Above: Jamie Wace with Ellen Broomé, CEO of the British Dyslexia Association, Adam Dance MP and fellow speakers at the APPG for Dyslexia, September 2025.

On 9 September 2025, I spoke in Parliament at a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Dyslexia. The subject was early identification and screening, and the meeting was chaired by Juliet Campbell MP, Member of Parliament for Broxtowe.

The British Dyslexia Association, which publishes the group’s meeting summaries, reported that there was standing room only. Here’s what was discussed, drawn from the BDA’s published summary, and what has happened since.

What is the APPG for Dyslexia?

All-Party Parliamentary Groups are informal, cross-party groups of MPs and peers who share an interest in an issue. The APPG for Dyslexia brings parliamentarians together with people working in the field to look at how dyslexic children and adults are identified and supported, and what policy could do better.

The September meeting asked what early identification and screening mean in practice: the possible benefits, such as reducing inequality and narrowing the attainment gap, and the challenges, from resourcing and training to the risk of relying too heavily on screening tools.

Who spoke

• Lynn Lovell, Head of Professional Standards at the British Dyslexia Association

• Professor Joel Talcott, Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at Aston University

• Jamie Wace, CEO of Talamo

• officials from the Department for Education

What I said

I talked about my own dyslexia, and about why I wanted to build an easy, low-cost screener for children. I described Talamo’s screener: designed for pupils aged 7 to 16, taking around 45 minutes, producing detailed reports, and usable across whole cohorts.

I argued strongly for universal and mandatory screening. I also pushed back on the idea of dyslexia as a “middle-class condition”, and stressed that identification has to be accessible and affordable.

At the Houses of Parliament for the APPG for Dyslexia.

The wider discussion

The meeting heard a range of views.

Screening and diagnosis do different jobs. Lynn Lovell set out how screeners differ from diagnostic assessments. Screeners are short and practical, can be used across whole classes, and help schools decide whether a full assessment should follow. Diagnostic assessments are in-depth and specialist-led. In the summary’s words, the two “are not alternatives but complementary”: screening helps schools act early, and a diagnostic assessment helps them act accurately.

Screening can start very early. Professor Talcott presented a short, teacher-led classroom screener for Year 1 pupils that links each child’s profile to interventions. He stressed that it supports teachers’ judgement rather than replacing it.

Reform was on the way. Department for Education officials outlined plans for SEND reform in a forthcoming White Paper, including a focus on early identification and on training through initial teacher training and continuing professional development. MPs pressed them on how quickly support and training would reach every school.

Caution matters too. Attendees raised concerns about labelling children too early and about bias in short assessments. In closing, Juliet Campbell recognised the value of the screening tools presented, while stressing the importance of avoiding premature labelling, and called for new approaches that reflect the realities of dyslexia.

The agreed next steps: the Department for Education would come back to the APPG on the dyslexia-specific content of its planned training, and the APPG would write to the Secretary of State about teacher training on SEND.

Earlier that summer: the podcast in Portcullis House

It wasn’t my first visit to Parliament that year. In June 2025, my Talking Dyslexia co-host Ellen Broomé, CEO of the British Dyslexia Association, and I recorded our conversation with Juliet Campbell in Portcullis House, part of the parliamentary estate in Westminster.

In the episode, Juliet talks about how being the parent of a dyslexic child inspired her to fight for better policy and support in education, from grassroots training to parliamentary reform. It came out on 7 October 2025, a month after the APPG meeting. You can read our write-up of Juliet Campbell’s episode.

Back in Parliament in October

On 22 October 2025, Leo Thornton, our Chief Product Officer, and I went back to Parliament for the British Dyslexia Association’s Parliamentary reception. The evening was built around young dyslexic people sharing their experiences with MPs and peers, to help raise dyslexia higher on the parliamentary agenda.

What has happened since

The APPG has kept going: in January 2026 it met to discuss a national strategy for dyslexia.

In October 2025, the BDA published research showing a wide income gap in who receives a formal dyslexia diagnosis. That gap is exactly why the “middle-class condition” point matters, and we look at the figures in Why early screening matters: what the evidence says in 2026.

In February 2026, the government’s Schools White Paper made early identification a stated priority of its proposed SEND reforms. Our guide to the SEND reforms explains what is confirmed and what is still proposed. Dyslexia screening has not been made mandatory.

Talamo has grown too. It is now used in over 1,300 UK schools, has screened over 25,000 children, and offers three assessments: Cognitive & Dyslexia, Executive Function, and Maths & Dyscalculia.

What it means for schools

The meeting’s central point still holds: finding needs early, and fairly, matters. How schools do that varies. Some screen whole year groups at key points, such as Year 3 or the move to secondary school; others screen individual pupils when a concern comes up. Either way, screening is a starting point, not a diagnosis. It helps schools decide what support to put in place, and who may need a specialist assessment.

If you’d like to see what a screening report contains, look through our sample reports. And you can read how we describe our relationship with the BDA, in the BDA’s own words, in Our relationship with the British Dyslexia Association.