The colourful way to teach children with dyslexia how to read

Ruth Kelly provoked fury when she decided to send her nine-year-old son to a private school because she lacked confidence in local state schools to deal with his dyslexia.

Now, as a result of a pioneering project at a primary school in Plymouth, future generations of parents may be spared the same agonising decision as the Communities Secretary and former education secretary.

Widewell School is poised to become the first primary in the country to take advantage of the Government's new trust school legislation to go into partnership with a dyslexia charity and revolutionise the help available for dyslexic children in state schools.

Ten per cent of children suffer from some form of dyslexia, according to estimates. That is 700,000 children throughout the state education system.

The 200-pupil primary school already has a growing reputation for the help it offers dyslexic pupils. It introduced a pilot project four years ago, which has had considerable success in improving reading standards.

It was first introduced for children who joined the reception class in the January term. By the end of the summer term, these children's reading had advanced beyond the level of those who had started the previous September, but not been part of the project.

Under the scheme, children are given whiteboards to write down words spoken out phonetically by their teacher and shown to them on coloured cards.

The cards and the black-on-white representation of the word on the whiteboard are said to aid the memory. It all became crystal clear to one five-year-old when she was asked to spell "milk". She pronounced each letter separately and then said gleefully "milk".

"That's right," said her teacher Jackie Martin, who has done a course in phonographics at Oxford. "If you're not sure, sound it out."

Amanda Holder, a mother with two children at the school - Lucy, 10, and Daniel, eight - is full of praise for the school.

"We've been at Widewell only a year," she said. "I have dyslexia in my family.

"At Daniel's previous school, they just didn't want to recognise it - yet he is quite severely dyslexic. He just sort of plodded along and then became a naughty child at the back of the classroom.

"When we came here, I spoke to Barbara Young [the headteacher] about the concerns I'd had with Daniel and he settled in really, really well. Within a couple of weeks, they'd assessed him and said, 'Yes, there is something going on here'."

Jacqueline Hick, whose son A.J, 11, is also dyslexic, added: "The thing is there's always someone to approach here.

"They don't just say, 'Oh, don't worry he's fine'. They say, 'You tell me what's wrong and we can discuss the problem'." A.J is now full of enthusiasm for reading and even says his favourite subject is literacy.

If the trust proposal goes ahead - and governors will take a final vote on it before the summer - it will join forces with Dyslexia Action to become the South-west's centre for training teachers in techniques to combat dyslexia.

Mel Saunders, Dyslexia Action's head of Southern region, added: "The key is to provide a programme that is sustainable and one that the school, and the wider community, can continue to use once our work comes to an end - providing a more inclusive education for the generations of children to come and breaking the cycle of failure."

Mrs Young, the headteacher, said: "I was very concerned about children's reading development. If you can't read, you cannot access the rest of the curriculum."

Ministers are optimistic that the project could be adopted nationwide. "This is just the kind of innovative project that is possible thanks to the flexibility of trust schools," said the Schools minister Andrew Adonis.

If the partnership gets the green light, Widewell will become one of the country's first trust schools from September.