Specialist Support for SpLD
Emerson House provides tailored support for children who are experiencing barriers in their primary school environment due to a Special Educational Need and Disability (SEND) profile.
We have a deep clinical understanding of how to provide remediation for those with Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLDs) such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, and dyspraxia. These profiles are often interrelated.
Children referred to Emerson House have typically experienced considerable challenges in phonological processing, literacy mechanics, and numerical cognition, which can impact their emotional well-being.
Intervention Frameworks: Designed for Progress
Our intervention sessions are structured to provide the child with measurable success at every stage, fostering self-confidence building and resilience coaching. This is achieved through:
- Static and Dynamic Assessment: Starting at the precise level where the child’s skills are secure.
- Guided Discovery: Empowering children to understand their own learning profile and develop metacognitive strategies.
- Cumulative Remediation: Introducing new techniques in explicit, manageable steps at the child’s individual pace.
- Multi-Sensory Activities: Using varied therapeutic protocols to strengthen cognitive and neural pathways.
- Memory Resource Management: Providing strategies to support working memory and processing skills.
- Consolidation: Providing extensive opportunities for over-learning to ensure skills are automated.
Phonological Appraisal and Literacy Remediation
At Emerson House, we specialise in the remediation of literacy barriers. We focus on the mechanics of decoding and comprehension processing to enable children to access text with confidence. This is achieved by:
- Foundational Skill Building: Developing the underlying phonological appraisal and visual recognition skills necessary for literacy success.
- Pattern Recognition: Exploring linguistic families and rules to reduce the cognitive load on working memory.
- Pre-Processing: Analysing vocabulary and phonetic structures independently before applying them to connected text.
- Fluency and Comprehension: Supporting all aspects of the reading process—from accuracy and speed to high-level comprehension processing.
- Structured Expression: Facilitating the transition to written expression by providing frameworks for organisation and thought-processing.
Numerical Cognition and Remediation
"At Emerson House, our primary objective is to make the foundations of numerical work as transparent and accessible as possible. Our methodologies have consistently improved the emotional well-being, self-confidence, and academic access of the children we support." (Dorian Yeo, founder of the Emerson House Maths methodology)
Dyslexia often has markers in challenges with numeracy. Dyscalculia as a learning difficulty also affects number understanding and processing of number concepts. These learning difficulties need to be identified and addressed differently.
Our approach to remediating numerical difficulties is highly structured and reason-based. We use physical cognitive tools and multi-sensory activities to build a concrete understanding of mathematical concepts.
The Emerson House methodology was pioneered by Dorian Yeo, whose work remains at the forefront of SpLD research. Our frameworks have been further developed by Jane Emerson and Patricia Babtie in collaboration with eminent researchers, including the renowned neurologist Prof. Brian Butterworth (UCL)who was a founder in the identification of dyscalculia as a learning difficulty. Our core principle is ensuring a robust grasp of foundational numerical processing before moving toward complex applications.
Assistive Technology and Motor Coordination (Touch Typing)
We support children in achieving functional cursive writing where possible. We also integrate Assistive Technology training through a specialist multi-sensory touch typing protocol, providing essential tools for children with SEND:
- Reducing Cognitive Load: Proficient touch typing removes the physical burden of handwriting, allowing the child to focus their processing resources on structure and content.
- Mechanical Support: For children with specific fine-motor challenges (dyspraxia), we focus on the longer-term goal of using assistive technology to facilitate written output in the classroom.
- Reinforcing Literacy: Our typing protocol mirrors our phonological remediation, reinforcing spelling and reading as letters and words are processed aurally, visually, and kinesthetically.
