6: International day for people with disabilities – 3 December

Jennie Mansfield:

Hello, and welcome to Ashurst Business Agenda. My name's Jennie Mansfield, and I'm a partner at Ashurst here in Sydney, Australia. Before starting, I'd like to acknowledge the First Nations peoples as the traditional custodians on the land on which we work in Australia and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's listening today.

Jennie Mansfield:

In today's episode, we're going to discuss how employers can get the best out of their employees who have had learning difficulties such as dyslexia. I'm delighted to say that our guest today is Georgina Perry, the New South Wales executive officer for SPELD that's S-P-E-L-D, a not-for-profit organisation that supports children and adults with learning difficulties.

Jennie Mansfield:

At SPELD, Georgina works to strengthen partnerships with educators, parents, and the community to deliver support for students and adults with specific learning difficulties, including dyslexia. Georgina brings lived experience to her job, having grown up with dyslexia herself. And George is a former lawyer and a former colleague of mine at Ashurst, so I'm particularly delighted to welcome her to the podcast.

Georgina Perry:

Hi, Jennie. Thanks so much for having me today.

Jennie Mansfield:

It's great to have you with us. George, let's start with your personal perspective. Can you share a little bit out your experience of living with a learning difficulty?

Georgina Perry:

Sure. I have both dyslexia and dysgraphia and that's something I found out about myself when I was in about year four or year five at school. Before that, I had been a very average student, who had struggled a little bit with re reading and struggled a lot with spelling. And my parents felt that there was something going on there that it wasn't expected, whilst my school at the time wasn't sure it was a good idea. They sent me off to a psychologist and I had a whole lot of educational assessment.

Georgina Perry:

And I do actually remember the day I found out I had dyslexia because I remember it as being a really positive day for me because I was told this was going on. And I left that appointment understanding about myself that there are going to be some things that are harder for me, but that didn't mean I wasn't capable. And it didn't mean I wasn't bright.

Georgina Perry:

It actually was a real turning point, I think in terms of my education and how much I applied myself to school. I did quite well at school after that. It wasn't to say that that was the solution, knowing that I had had dyslexic. It was a solution to all the difficulties I had with learning. I have strong memories of running out of a year eight spelling test in tears, because it was all just a little bit too much.

Georgina Perry:

And I had some adjustments that were made for the school certificate as we had then, to make that a little bit more accessible for me. But even just knowing that about myself, made it easier for me to plan and organise and understand how I might cope with different situations.

Jennie Mansfield:

So interesting. And George, since that day, that revelation about yourself, your path has taken you to be the executive for SPELD New South Wales. Tell us a little bit about what SPELD does and the services it provides.

Georgina Perry:

Sure. SPELD's a not-for-profit and we are one of a number of SPELD organisations in Australia, which all work together under the banner of SPELD. But SPELD New South Wales provides support to adults and children who have specific learning difficulties, such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia.

Georgina Perry:

And we do that through a range of support. Some of that is support for families. We have a free info line where families can bring up and talk to one of our educational advisors about what's going on for themselves or more often, what's going on for their child or the child that care for. We also run parent webinars and offer psychological assessments of learning difficulties.

Georgina Perry:

And then on top of that, we do a large amount of support for teachers in schools. We do a lot of teacher professional learning, both into how to support students who have learning difficulties, but also evidence based literacy and numeracy instruction. The approach that we take is very much providing support to make sure that kids and adults that struggle with learning difficulties are able to achieve their very best.

Jennie Mansfield:

And George, given your personal experience, what does it mean to you to be working for an organisation like SPELD?

Georgina Perry:

It's a dream job, I must say. I thought I had my dream job because the job I had before working at SPELD was actually working in the Ashurst pro bono team, where I worked with you, Jennie, quite closely on a range of different projects. And it was a role I loved because I got to give back to the community and I got to support vulnerable communities.

Georgina Perry:

But just after my daughter was born, we found out that my son, who was then six, had dyslexia. And I very much knew that was a possibility. Dyslexia is highly heritable. There's a 40% chance that if you've got dyslexia, another first degree relative will also have it. So I knew that that was something that was a possibility for my son. But then when he really struggled in kindie with his reading, we looked into it further and he got diagnosed with dyslexia.

Georgina Perry:

And that really spurred me into looking into what was going on with literacy instruction and how you support students with dyslexia in a way that I haven't really ever done. Because prior to that, I was a student with dyslexia who was just trying to work out how it worked best for me. And now I was starting to look, how do I support my son?

Georgina Perry:

And so, I started to look into what could I do to contribute to this space. And I saw the role at SPELD come up advertised through one of the dyslexia networks and thought, "Oh, no, I absolutely love my job at Ashurst. I'll stick with that." And then I saw it again a couple months later and they still hadn't found someone. I thought, "Well, really, I think this is my dream job." And I applied and was lucky enough to get it. I've been here for four years and worked with a really passionate team of people. And we're all really absolutely dedicated to supporting students who struggle with learning with literacy and numeracy.

Jennie Mansfield:

George, I'd love to hear some more about how some of these difficulties impact on an individual's work at school and then work in career.

Georgina Perry:

Sure, absolutely. Dyslexia is a difficulty with reading. And so what that looks like is a difficulty with accuracy and fluency of reading. It's really a fundamental difficulty with what reading is. And students can dyslexia, as with all the specific learning difficulties on the spectrum. Some students can have a mild impact and some students can have a more significant impact.

Georgina Perry:

And what I would say is that almost all of those students with additional support and intervention, and the support we're looking for when we are talking about dyslexia is structured synthetic phonics. Or structured synthetic phonics is a approach to making sure students are taught by using a really explicit approach to phonics.

Georgina Perry:

The support that we want to see those kids have is receiving instruction in phonics in the classroom, and then, also in learning support and additional support that they receive. We know that by providing that structured support, that additional help, many, if not all students who have dyslexia can really improve their reading skills.

Jennie Mansfield:

And you mentioned dysgraphia. That's a different disability.

Georgina Perry:

Yeah. So dysgraphia is a difficulty with anything to do with written expression. So that can be spelling, the organisation of your writing, your grammar punctuation, and it can sometimes include difficulties with your handwriting. But if you only have difficulty with handwriting, then that's less likely to be dysgraphia and be more of a motor difficulty.

Georgina Perry:

But definitely, handwriting difficulties can be caught up as well with dysgraphia. And students with dysgraphia need specific support and specific tools to help them improve the area of difficulty. So not all students with dysgraphia will have spelling difficulties and not all students with dysgraphia will have writing difficulties. There will be a mixture of difficulties they'll experience across their writing skills and they definitely need to have additional instruction and additional practise in those areas.

Jennie Mansfield:

And you also mentioned dyscalculia. How does that fit into the picture?

Georgina Perry:

Yeah. Dyscalculia is a difficulty with maths and in particular, it's a difficulty with the fundamentals of number sense, is what it often looks like. Students understanding how numbers relate to each other, their magnitude, which number is bigger than other. Learning their number facts is often quite difficult.

Georgina Perry:

We're talking about when I say to you, "What's five plus five?" You're probably going to tell me 10 without having to do that addition. A student with dyscalculia might need to do that addition each time they do it. Or might take a lot longer to learn those simple number facts that you use again and again, when you're doing calculations. And so, it's a real difficulty with understanding how numbers work.

Georgina Perry:

And so, making sure that students both have lots of different additional instruction that really breaks down maths and gives them opportunities to practise those fundamental math skills is important. But also, putting in place scaffolds and supports that enable them to check their maths and ensure that they are actually providing the right answer is important.

Georgina Perry:

From simple things like making sure that the calculator that you use has the sum that you entered as well as the answer you entered, so that you check can check that you entered the right sum to get the answer. Because you might not have a very good understanding of magnitude of number and so you might not be able to do a sense check for the calculation that you've entered.

Jennie Mansfield:

And George, what are the changes you've seen, perhaps changes that you have contributed to since you were a student with these difficulties?

Georgina Perry:

I think there's a lot more awareness. There's a lot more awareness within families and within teachers and schools that the specific learning difficulties exist. And that there's support that can and should be provided to students. I don't think we're there yet. There's still a lot of teachers that we talked to who didn't learn a lot about the specific learning disorders, dyslexia, dysgraphia in their initial teacher education.

Georgina Perry:

And a lot of teachers come to us and say they really want more information. But there's a lot more awareness and there's also a better understanding of what we need to do to support students who have difficulties with literacy and numeracy. And the evidence based approaches that we need to take to support them both in the classroom and outside the classroom.

Jennie Mansfield:

You've shared with us a little about out the highs and the lows that you have experienced yourself. Tell us a little bit about your experience as a young lawyer in a corporate environment. How did you handle that situation?

Georgina Perry:

Yeah, as I was coming up to this podcast, reflecting again on my early years as a lawyer. And I remember some of the feedback that I got from the partners that I worked for at the time who said, "Your work's great. You're doing a good job, but you really need to have much more attention to detail in your work." And I'm like, "Oh, God. I thought I was really focusing on the law and paying attention to all the details of the legislation and getting the right answers."

Georgina Perry:

And it turned out, it was actually the editing of my written work that they were commenting on. And I look back now as a slightly older adult and reflect that I wish I had told the partners that I worked for that I actually had dyslexia because that was what was going on. It wasn't that I wasn't paying attention to what I was reading or the answers that I was trying to formulate. It was that I, as someone who has dyslexia and dysgraphia, I'm a highly literate person. I've had a lot of support overcoming difficulties. And I've made a lot of progress, but my spelling is frankly, occasionally wonky.

Georgina Perry:

And I don't always pick up the errors in the text. I know a lot of people that are strong spellers, when they look at a piece of writing, the errors just jump out at them like they're flashing with a red light. If I've done the writing, I don't necessarily see the errors. And I think that, looking back, I had a whole lot of really supportive partners. If I had raised that as an issue, I'm sure we would've come to some sort of solutions to help me through that.

Georgina Perry:

And I think that's even easier now, if you are someone who is working in a corporate environment and you are struggling with your literacy in one way or another, there's so much more technology that's really readily accessible to help you with that. Whether it's really complex spell checks, ways that you do speech to text, text to speech, there's lots of ways that you can support yourself in improving your literacy as a corporate professional.

Jennie Mansfield:

George, as you said, we worked together quite a lot when you're at Ashurst, which was of course, my pleasure. But I didn't know this part of your story. Do you feel you made a conscious or unconscious choice not to disclose? And why do you think people don't disclose that information about themselves and ask for help?

Georgina Perry:

I think with myself, by the time I was working with you, Jennie, I had worked out what I needed. I didn't really need people to know. I think looking back on it, I wish I had spoken up earlier in my career when I definitely did need that support. But I think a lot of the reasons that a lot of people don't talk about it is there is a little bit of a stigma attached to not being a great reader or a great speller or finding numbers difficult. And that's a real misunderstanding when it comes to dyslexia.

Georgina Perry:

Maybe I should just step back and talk a little bit about what the specific learning disorders are and then, the impact that they have. Dyslexia is a difficulty with learning to read. Dysgraphia is a difficulty with spelling and written expression. Organising writing, clarity of sentences, grammar, punctuation. And dyscalculia is a difficulty with numeracy. In particular, with come to those fundamental aspects of number sense of how numbers work and relate to each other.

Georgina Perry:

And so, students that have these difficulties or adults that have these difficulties have a difficulty in the specific area. That's why they call the specific learning difficulties because they relate to a particular area. But that difficulty doesn't necessarily generalise to the rest of their abilities or their capabilities. It doesn't impact your intelligence.

Georgina Perry:

And so, I think that's one of the real misconceptions about someone who might have difficulty with reading is that maybe they're not just very capable. Whereas in fact, that person can be highly capable, they just find reading hard, or their spelling's not strong, or they make a lot of errors when they're doing calculations. Whatever the difficulty is, it is quite specific to that area and it doesn't mean that they're not capable of achieving across the rest of the domains. And it doesn't mean they're not capable of improving those skills. And it doesn't mean that there's not support that's available.

Georgina Perry:

I think there is still some stigma attached to it. And that's one of the reasons why I was super excited to come along and participate in this podcast is to share some of my story. And hopefully, listeners that are experiencing those difficulties, can understand that there is support and organisations like Ashurst are keen to be supportive.

Jennie Mansfield:

And, and George, for those employers who do want to be supportive and hire great, intelligent people who might need some accommodation, what are some of the new technologies that are available?

Georgina Perry:

Yes. If we're talking about literacy difficulties, speech to text is fabulous. Text to speech is available. And the nice thing about computer technology now is most of that is inbuilt in the devices that you have. You can use spell checks that are better than the spell check that you put on your computer, like Grammarly. Which the premium version in a professional environment would be a great asset to have, which gives you some good feedback on errors that you're making and picks up more than the basic spell check that comes with your word processing software.

Georgina Perry:

Something like Grammarly is fabulous for people that really struggle with their writing, predictive spelling. And then just learning to use some technology as an editing tool. One of the things that's a right way to edit text that if I had used as an early student, is to have the computer read that text back to me. If I had done that and spent those five minutes doing that, I'm sure I would've picked up a lot more of the errors than when I was looking for them myself.

Georgina Perry:

It's both about having technology that's there and available. A lot of it's available. There are some additional subscriptions that are worth looking into in a corporate environment, such as maybe Speechify or Grammarly. But a lot of it's already in your computer, but it's also just about how you use that and using that in a way that enables you to produce really good quality work and make sure your errors are being picked up.

Jennie Mansfield:

And what other sorts of resources can SPELD help parents and teachers to connect with?

Georgina Perry:

If you are a parent and you're looking for support with your student who's struggling with literacy or numeracy in any way, if you ring our info line, we can talk you through what you're seeing with your student, your child. What's going on. We can help you understand a little bit about what that might be.

Georgina Perry:

We've got parent webinars that run all the time with a bit more information about supporting literacy at home or numeracy at home. We also offer diagnostic services. And we can also refer families to specialist tutors that have trained in supporting students who are having particular difficulties with literacy and numeracy. And so, we can refer families to those tutors to get extra support if that support is not available in the school.

Jennie Mansfield:

Your story really illustrates the importance of a diagnosis. What do you say to parents about looking for a diagnosis early when they start to observe some difficulties?

Georgina Perry:

I think probably two things. For me, a diagnosis was a really important thing and is a really important part of my story. It's not essential, particularly in New South Wales to have a diagnosis. What is essential though, is to identify that there is a difficulty with literacy and numeracy and to provide that support.

Georgina Perry:

Some families choose to pursue a diagnosis and that's great. And either your local SPELD can offer that to you or can refer you to another psychologist who might be able to assist. And that's great, but not all families can afford a diagnosis. It's not something that's covered by Medicare. It's not something that's covered by private health insurance.

Georgina Perry:

And definitely, in New South Wales in the school system, the fact that you are having literacy and numeracy should be something that ideally is identified and early intervention is provided, is our goal really. And a lot of schools are meeting that goal, but some are still working towards that.

Jennie Mansfield:

And what can parents do if they feel that their child's school, perhaps isn't as onto the issue as they'd like it to be?

Georgina Perry:

We'd all always encourage you to start talking to the classroom teacher first. If you're not feeling like you're being heard or you're getting answers that make sense to you, make sure you talk to other people in the school, whether that's learning support and the deputy principal, the principal.

Georgina Perry:

And then, if you're still struggling, if you're not getting heard, then definitely do give us a ring. We can chat through some of the other options. Within department schools, so the public school system, there's a support structure that's available that you can can access as part of the regional network of schools and within the independent schools. It varies a little bit depending on the school. But if you are struggling with that, do give us a call. We're happy to chat that through.

Jennie Mansfield:

George, how can our listeners access more information about SPELD and its services?

Georgina Perry:

Sure. The SPELD website's probably the best place to go. And that's speldnewsouthwales.org.au. If you are in New South Wales and you can access our phone numbers and email address from there, but we've also got a really easy to use contact form on the website that people can use if they want additional help, whether they're families or teachers.

Georgina Perry:

And if you're not in New South Wales, go to the AUSPELD website, which is A-U-S-P-E-L-D.org.au, which is the SPELD organisations across Australia. And that way you can access information, contact details about your local SPELD and the support that they can provide you.

Jennie Mansfield:

Thanks, George. And thank you so much for sharing the technical information that you've given us today, but, but even more importantly, the personal insights that you've shared. It's been really wonderful talking with you.

Georgina Perry:

Thanks so much, Jennie. It's been great being here and lovely to catch up.

Jennie Mansfield:

Thank you for listening to Ashurst's Business Agenda. We hope you found this episode both worthwhile and insightful. To learn more about our podcast channel, please visit ashurst.com/podcast. To ensure you don't miss future episodes, subscribe now on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favourite podcast platform. While there, please feel free to keep the conversation going and leave us for rating or review. Thanks again for listening and goodbye for now.

Host:

If you enjoy Ashurst Business Agenda, why not check out our other two podcast series as well? Ashurst Legal Outlook explains the emerging legal trends and requirements of our fast changing world. And ESG Matters at Ashurst reveals how business leaders are rising to mounting environmental, social, and governance challenges. You can listen and subscribe to Legal Outlook and ESG matters wherever you get your podcasts.