Classroom Adjustments for Dyslexia: What to Actually Ask Your Child's School For

If your child has just been identified as dyslexic, you may have been handed a diagnosis and very little else. Maybe a mention of "reasonable adjustments" in a meeting, maybe a leaflet. What often goes unsaid is the practical part: what those adjustments actually are, and how to ask for them in a way a busy school can say yes to.

The good news is that the changes that make the biggest difference are usually small. They are not expensive, and they do not require a whole new curriculum. They just require someone to notice what a dyslexic brain is up against, and to adjust the environment instead of asking the child to try harder.

Here is a starting list, drawn from what genuinely works day to day.

Start with what your child can actually see

One of the most overlooked adjustments is visual. Bright, high-contrast page layouts can be genuinely hard for a dyslexic child to track. Parenting coach Charis Halsall noticed this instantly when she looked at her son's maths book at parents evening. The glaring blue grid lines made his workings almost impossible to follow, not just for him - but for her, too.

The fix was a single conversation. His maths book was swapped for one with softer grey squares, and it changed how easily he could track his own work. This is the kind of adjustment that costs nothing and takes one email, but rarely gets suggested because most people setting up the classroom are not dyslexic and simply do not see the problem.

Worth asking for: coloured overlays or tinted paper, a specific background colour on screens, larger spacing between lines, and a readable font. Small visual tweaks, big daily difference.

Separate the idea from the handwriting

Many dyslexic children have a rich inner world and a slow, effortful route onto the page. When getting words down by hand is the bottleneck, everything they can actually think gets lost.

Voice-to-text can change this overnight. Charis describes her son producing a short, hard-to-read essay one week, then, once set up with voice-to-text, producing something three times longer and full of description the next. The ideas were always there. The writing was the thing standing in the way.

Worth asking for: access to voice-to-text or a laptop for extended writing, the option to record answers verbally, and marking that assesses ideas rather than penalising spelling in subjects that are not about spelling. One caution from Charis's own school years: a tool handed over without support can make things worse, not better. If your child gets a laptop, ask what training and follow-up come with it.

Set the work at the right level, not the year-group level

Schools often try to help a struggling child by giving them more of the work they find hardest, in the hope of catching them up. For a dyslexic child, this tends to backfire. They are already more tired than their peers, because doing difficult work all day is exhausting, so piling on more of the same produces overwhelm, not progress.

Charis puts it plainly: her son is in year three with phonics at reception level, so she asked the school a simple question: would you give a reception child year three spellings? When the work was set at his actual level, with a visual to help him remember, his score went from two out of ten to five out of five. Not because the bar dropped, but because the bar finally matched him.

Worth asking for: spellings and reading pitched to your child's current level, shorter targets rather than longer ones, and progress measured against their own starting point rather than a class average.

Protect self-esteem as a stated goal

This is the adjustment that underpins all the others, and the one most likely to be missing from any formal plan. A child who feels useless is not in a state to learn. A child who comes home with two out of ten week after week starts to build an internal story that they are not good enough, and that story can outlast school by decades.

Charis is clear that her main objective is not her son's grades. It is keeping his self-esteem high, because to her a grade measures how good a child is at the art of schooling, not their intelligence or their worth. When you frame adjustments around protecting confidence, rather than closing a gap, the whole conversation with school changes.

Worth asking for: an agreement that support is measured by wellbeing and progress, not just attainment, and a shared understanding that reducing daily shame is a legitimate educational goal.

Frequently asked questions

What adjustments can a school make for a dyslexic child?
Common ones include coloured overlays or grey rather than bright grids, larger line spacing, voice-to-text or laptop access, verbal answers, spellings set at the child's actual level, and marking that does not penalise spelling in non-spelling subjects. The best adjustments are specific to your child, so ask what they personally find hardest.

How do I ask my child's school for dyslexia support?
Come with specific, low-cost requests rather than general concerns. Naming one concrete change, like softer grey maths grids or voice-to-text for longer writing, is easier for a school to action than "he needs more support". Frame it around what helps your child access learning, and ask to review how it is going rather than assuming one change fixes everything.

Should a dyslexic child do extra work to catch up?
Usually not in the form of more of the hardest work. A dyslexic child is often already exhausted from a full day of effortful tasks, so extra difficult work tends to cause overwhelm rather than progress. Working at the right level and measuring progress against their own starting point is more effective and far kinder.

Why does my dyslexic child seem to give up or avoid work?
What looks like avoidance is often a nervous system responding to something that feels too hard. A child cannot learn well when they feel anxious or ashamed, because survival takes priority over information. When work is pitched correctly and the child feels safe, that reluctance usually eases.

The through-line

None of these adjustments are about lowering expectations. They are about removing the obstacles that sit between a capable child and the ideas already in their head. The dyslexia is not the problem to be managed. The environment is the thing that needs to flex.

If you want to hear this from a parent who has lived both sides of it, as a dyslexic child and as a dyslexic mum advocating for her son, listen to Charis Halsall's full conversation with Dr Emma Offord in Parenting Unplugged: Raising Neuro-affirming Families on This Voice Is Mine: The Unquiet Podcast.