ABSTRACT
Matthew has had a chequered educational past. Between the ages of five and eight he had frequent and prolonged bouts of tonsilitis. His parents feel he missed the best part of three years of schooling and during this period they noticed that Rosemary, his younger sister, was beginning to overtake Matthew in her reading ability. They voiced their concern to the head teacher at a Parents Evening but Matthew was not given any extra help. They felt that communication between the head teacher and class teachers was so poor that information about Matthew just didn’t get passed on; their worries were not taken seriously enough and the impression they received was that they should just ‘wait and see’. When Matthew was not given books to take home from school his parents bought them themselves. They feel angry about the wasted opportunities of those years; they regard it as part of a school’s job to help students like Matthew catch up on schooling they miss.
