Staff Training @ Homerton University Hospital: How to Identify and Support Students with Specific Learning Differences (SpLDs)

We are Neil Goldwasser and Emma Allsopp, Dyslexia Support Tutors within Learning Success @ LEaD. We recently visited Homerton University Hospital, in response to a training request from the Nursing Education Facilitator. The attendees were mentors for student nurses, midwives and allied health professionals. Our aims were to develop their awareness and strategies in order to better support City students on placement there. We only had two hours, and so focussed on dyslexia and dyspraxia, being the specific learning differences that we encounter most often in our students, but also referred to the wider concepts of neurodiversity and inclusivity.

The staff were highly engaged with lots of participation in the discussions and exercises. In particular, they responded well to the re-framing of both “learning difficulties” to “learning differences”, and from the “deficit model” to the “diversity model”, acknowledging the associated strengths of SpLDs as the other side of the coin.

We were pleased to have the opportunity to offer support to City students indirectly via their clinical practice, all the while helping staff feel more confident about supporting any students experiencing challenges. We had run this event once previously in September 2015, and hope to re-run it regularly in future years, both at Homerton and offering the workshop as training for other departments in the wider university.

If you work at City and feel that your department would benefit from this workshop, please contact us on dyslexia@city.ac.uk. We would also welcome the opportunity to attend your student inductions, in order to explain the support available through Learning Success. This additionally includes Disability Support and Academic Learning Support. Further information is also available on the Learning Success Moodle site at tiny.cc/learningsuccess.