Kalan O'Neill strains his eyes towards the whiteboard but can't make out the letters written by his teacher.
The Canberra student grabs a paper printout in front of him but it has a metallic shine, forcing him to squint and search for words through the reflecting light. Slightly panicked, he tries to catch up by taking notes from the teacher's explanations but his writing is slow and messy.
And the kids beside him are laughing.
''All your Ps and Qs are back to front, and so are your Bs and Ds,'' the boy beside him taunts.
''Didn't you learn that properly in kindergarten?''
After being diagnosed with dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD, it's fair to say the 20-year-old Macquarie University history student struggled through school. And he is not alone.
At least 10 to 15per cent of every Australian classroom experiences a learning difficulty of some sort, and many are falling through the cracks.
Statistics from the Coalition of Australian Governments show 52per cent of 15 to 19-year-olds leave school with literacy levels ''insufficient to meet complex demands of everyday work and life''.
For all adults, the statistic is 45per cent.
Students with learning difficulties are graduating from school barely able to read or write but educators, governments and scientists are at a loss over how to deal with the problem.
Craig Wright, president of Learning Difficulties Australia, says there is too much confusion over whether these children have an ingrained disability that cannot be fixed or simply a developmental delay. ''In the US, they try to differentiate between kids who have general learning difficulties and those with disabilities by putting every kid who struggles into an intervention class,'' he said.
''After intensive tutoring, anyone who ends up an OK reader after six months or a year is deemed to have just a learning difficulty and the rest, who didn't improve, have a disability.
''But this is nonsense because they still haven't identified the cause.''
In Britain many experts say any child with a learning difficulty has dyslexia and that dyslexia is an intellectual disability.
Wright says dyslexia literally means ''poor with words'' but that many Australian practitioners had ''bastardised'' the term to become a diagnosis rather than a description.
He says there is no evidence-based research to show what is causing learning difficulties and how they should be identified.
But various practitioners across Australia had drawn up a list of more than 20 symptoms asociated with the condition, ranging from mirror imaging to writing backwards, confusing letters, being unable to sequence sounds and seeing words move on a page.
Wright says most experts agree that the majority of students with learning difficulties can improve their academic results with the right tuition but that mainstream teachers do not have the skills necessary to deliver such specialised instruction.
In fact, he believes that 80per cent of school students learn to read by ''sheer genetic fluke''.
''Because a large majority of kids learn to read fairly easily we develop a belief the kids read because of the education system but the truth is, they learn to read despite the system,'' he says.
''For example, most skilled adult readers are not aware of what a low frequency letter-sound conversion is but they know how it works because they've looked at a book, got an idea of what's going on and been able to abstract the rules as they go along.
''There is evidence that kids with dyslexia respond to the same teaching as a normal reader, they just need to be taught it more systematically, more explicitly.''
The theory is supported by University of Canberra senior lecturer in language and literacy Misty Adoniou, who sees her teaching graduates become frustrated when they cannot help students who are falling further and further behind.
She says primary school teachers undertake a four-year teaching degree and though many do a minor in inclusive education, they are not equipped with the skills to deal with high-need students.
''I think most teachers come out with the understanding that every task must include a visual, auditory or kinesthetic element (students need to see, hear and do a task) but that is as far as it goes,'' she says.
High school teachers are even less prepared, completing a three-year degree in their subject of specialisation and just one year of a teaching degree that focuses on teaching methods.
Adonieu has conducted her own research in Canberra interviewing children with learning difficulties and says the fact that humans were not born or designed to read became obvious as she studied how each child retained knowledge.
''Most of us have a fairly efficient path to learn but for some of us our brain doesn't track that way, so we have to think of a new path,'' she says
''I've actually heard of these new MRI scans for the brain that monitored children who have learning difficulties trying to read at five years of age and their brain doesn't light up in the same way that an average child does.
''In fact, a number of them were using the other side of their brain, which is a really inefficient way to read.''
The use of neurological brain scans is a practice that has existed for at least 20 years but is still considered an alternative practice in Australia.
The process relies on electroencephalography (EEG) scans, which use a series of electrodes attached to the head to measure the level of electrical activity in the brain.
In the past the scans have been used simply to detect abnormalities in electricity flow to diagnose things like epilepsy or brain death but a new form, quantitative electroencephalography (QEEG) actually uses a computer to analyse the data and compare the activity of different segments of the brain.
Neurologists in the US have used the scans to show that a person with dyslexia actually uses a much larger percentage of their brain to complete the same task as a normally functioning learner.
Dr Matthew Holmes, from the Australasian Academy of Functional Neurology, says the brain is a series of links that are all interconnected, so a dysfunction in one area will ultimately affects others down the line. Therefore, if a student cannot learn through a traditional pathway they are forced to think harder to find a new way of learning the same material.
While problems such as dyslexia or behavioural issues often correlate with decreased activity in certain areas of the brain, Holmes says it is not the job of someone practising functional neurology to diagnose learning or behavioural disorders in a patient.
''When a child comes to me they've usually already been diagnosed as dyslexic by a child psychologist,'' he says.
''I might then identify that they have an underactivity in the left hemisphere of the brain and do exerises to increase its function, and as a consequence of that you'd expect the dyslexia to improve.
''We do balance, co-ordination and various mental exercises in rhythm and timing as well as ... lightweight spinal work and cranial adjustments, where we work on reshaping the skull to improve fluid flow around the brain.''
Functional neurology is still considered a fringe therapy by some and Holmes has had a number of schools refuse to advertise it in their newsletters under the guidance of school psychologists.
But the process has been praised by a number of Canberra students receiving the treatment in Kambah, including Kalan O'Neill. He visited about nine specialists, including psychologists, doctors, counsellors and tutors, before stumbling across the services of ACT Literacy Tutoring director and Irlen Dyslexia diagnostician Karen England when he was 15. She took him back to the basics, made him read flash cards, break words down into chunks, sound them out syllable by syllable then write them over and over until he got them right every time. At the time he started Kalan had a reading age of 10 years old. Within a year he had improved to 12 and by the time he finished college he was at his normal reading age.
His migraines, which were so severe he often had to stay home for three weeks at a time, had halved.
Kalan got his first brain scan in Sydney at the age of 17.
''When I went to get the brain scan you could see from the highlighted part that my brain was working four times as hard as it should've been just to take in my classes,'' he says.
''It made so much sense because I used to come home from school so exhausted I would pass out for three or four hours, get up to eat then go straight back to sleep.''
Four years later, he completes half-hour neurofeedback sessions twice a week with psychologist Dr John Hegg.
England uses the treatment with her clients and has a 75per cent success rate.
''What happens is the children sit and watch DVDs and either John or I slowly alter the screen so that the sound drops or the picture becomes more pixilated,'' she says.
''We monitor their level of brain activity so that they have to work a little harder to make the picture become clear again but never adjust it so heavily that their brain goes into overload and switches off.
''It is non-intrusive and it not a process of pumping electricity into the brain like some people might suggest. We simply look at the level of hertz the brain is working at, determine which level of hertz we want it to work at and adjust the program so that the brain trains itself to work more efficiently.
''They've been doing this in America for 30 years now but in Australia, we're very slow at picking it up.''
Specialist services are hard to find and with so little concrete evidence, many parents are forced to do their own research and rely on a system of trial and error.
Psychology appointments, tutoring, counselling, learning resources and neuroscans are expensive but dyslexia is not formally recognised as a disability in many states, making it almost impossible to receive financial support.
National Disability Co-ordinator and president of the Australian Learning Disability Association Timothy Hart said some parents were becoming so desperate they were going to ''certain doctors'' to get their children diagnosed with autism.
''A lot of kids with learning disabilities also have social problems, usually because they get isolated by other kids for being different, and conditions like Asperger's and autism attract more money,'' he said.
''Anecdotally, I've seen parents who were told (by other specialists) that they need a diagnosis to get funding and they were pushed towards a certain doctor or person to get it.''
For those families who feel they have tried everything, technology has become the last resort.
The release of iPads and smartphones has made programs such as voice-to-text, notetaking, audio recording and picture documentation more accessible but specialists say such devices have been in use for decades.
Gerry Kennedy, an independent consultant in inclusive technology, says too many highly intelligent children were being written off by society just because they could not read or write.
He points to a British study commissioned by the BBC which showed that 40per cent of the 300 millionaires surveyed had been diagnosed with dyslexia at school.
It is estimated the percentage would be even higher among billionaires.
''Our education system is based on the premise of learning information and regurgitating it in exam-type conditions,'' Kennedy says.
''But traditional assessments don't work for these kids who are not confident with text in the way most educators deem success to be rated.
''If you give a kid a traditional essay they might falter because they have a handwriting difficulty but if you give them a camera, let them construct a script or a video montage you might find astonishingly different outcomes.''
Mr Kennedy, who specialises in IT, first started exploring assistive technologies when he worked in a school for the blind in 1995 and eventually expanded to cater for children with multiple disabilities.
The technologies he uses today range from special pens to computer software, touch screen tablets, audio recording devices, notetaking tools, comprehension toolbars and more.
One example is the Live Scribe pen, which automatically records a teacher talking. Students use the pen to take notes or draw images and when they click on their notes later, the pen will take them back to the time in the audio recording at which the note was written.
Another, Speaking Language Master, is a portable computer device with functions such as a speaking dictionary, phonetic spell correction, voice spelling words one letter at a time, synonyms, antonyms and a grammar guide.
Kennedy works with teams of specialists to find the right combination of devices for each student but says Australia is 30 years behind the US, Britain and Europe in allowing these technologies to be incorporated into the classroom for those with a demonstrated need.
Kennedy said it was frustrating for parents to realise that there were solutions for their children of which they were completely unaware.
''I had one parent read all of my material online in 48 hours. She lived on coffee for a couple of days just trying to find out what was out there for her boys and by the end she realised her school hadn't done due diligence.''
Awareness of learning difficulties is growing and educators are confident progress is slowly, but surely, being made. Wright encouraged families to persist in fighting for solutions for their children and said they should seek help sooner rather than later.
''Make sure you find an expert who focuses on the skills your child is lacking,'' he says.
''If they have trouble reading there is no point doing an IQ test, or blood test or seeing a behavioural specialist because you're just moving away from the problem.
'' A good expert will assess the skill regularly and show you a graph of weekly or at least fortnightly progress.
''If you can't see that chart moving upwards within six to eight weeks, perhaps even less, I'd run a mile.
''I'd like to say there is one kind of expert you should go to but the reality is, we haven't figured out just who it is you need to go to.''
Breanna Tucker is The Canberra Times' Schools Reporter
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