Dyslexia Support At HSU

While you are a student with us at Health Sciences University, you’ll have access to our Student Services team who can help you to diagnose and manage your dyslexia.

This can include helping with exam adjustments and planning assignments, giving you revision strategies and helping you to feel confident with study skills.

Disability and Inclusion Officer, Deborah Tanner, and English Tutor for Academic Purposes, Katie White, tell us more about how the team can support you and how you can get the most out of Student Services during your time at HSU, with or without a dyslexia diagnosis:

How Dyslexia Can Affect You

“Dyslexia is quite broad in how it can affect you” explains Deborah. “It can affect different people in different ways. Depending on how you are affected, things like reading, processing information and writing essays can take longer.

“Dyslexia can affect your memory, meaning that you could have difficulty recalling what you have learnt in a lecture and piecing it together.

“Some struggle with their reading; you might need to re-read a sentence multiple times to get the correct meaning from it. You might misread words frequently or you might lose your place when you’re reading.

“With writing, dyslexia can mean that you have difficulty getting the thoughts that you have in your head down on paper and struggle to make the writing flow in a logical way.  If you have a dyslexic profile you can be very able verbally but struggle to get your ideas across in writing.”

Getting Dyslexia Diagnosed

Disability and Inclusion Officer, Deborah says: “We offer dyslexia assessments at HSU. The first step would be for you to come and talk to me and discuss the areas that you are struggling with. I will look at the difficulties you experience with reading and writing.

“If appropriate, we will then refer you for a dyslexia assessment and get you booked in. It takes about two and a half to three hours to do the assessment, and the report is then ready about two weeks later.

“This report helps us to make the appropriate accommodations for students and give recommendations to their tutors.

“If you have been diagnosed with dyslexia before arriving at university or feel it would be an appropriate diagnosis for you, it is important that you reach out to us as we want to support you. It’s all about levelling the playing field so we can help you to achieve great results.”

What Support Is In Place If You Have Dyslexia?

“We offer Student Learning Plans which are written with you.

“We look for things that we can put in place to support you whilst you are studying with us. This might be recommendations for you to try things e.g. multisensory reading.

“Other recommendations would be for the tutors themselves e.g. If you are a student who experiences problems remembering verbal instructions, we recommend that the tutors hand out a physical list of instructions that you can tick off as you complete.

“These plans focus not only on areas that you experience difficulties with, but also your strengths, as we want to keep the report balanced.

“We also ask the tutors to always share PowerPoints in advance of the class. Very often, a student with a dyslexic profile will struggle with listening and writing notes at the same time. This way, you can have an idea of what the content is going to be, and this can help you to focus on what the lecturer is actually telling you and reduce the number of notes you need to take.

“Exam adjustments can also be made depending on your learning difference.

“We also recommend that you book study skills appointments for areas that the Study Skills Tutors can help you with.”

Support Offered By Study Skills Tutors

Katie outlines the support available: “Students will come to us with different needs and wanting help with a variety of things. Sometimes it might be about writing an essay, how to manage lectures if they aren’t coping with the pace of learning or sometimes it can be about procrastination and time management.

“There are different ways we can help you depending on your needs. We can tailor strategies depending on how you already function.

“We can analyse samples of your work and help with the planning process such as the literature searching and finding relevant references. Together we can rewrite sections of an essay which you can then apply when independently working on an essay.

“We hold writing cafes throughout term time every week, every Wednesday 10–12. Here students can meet or use it as a quiet space to go through some work. We are there to help with any questions that you might have.

“This year, we’re going to have some new workshops called Action Stations which is targeted to time management and doing a task without procrastination. Keep an eye out for these!

“We’re also going to have a workshop called retreat and revise which is where you can come and use the space to revise and get advice about revision techniques.”

Making The Most Out Of The Support Offered At HSU

“The most important thing is if you are struggling, you should come into Student Services where an appropriate appointment can be booked in.

“We are a friendly and approachable team who are totally non-judgemental. It can feel like a big step to actually come and ask for help, but we want to remind students that anything important to you is important to us. We want to help.

“All students can come along to get support.

“We want to break down the barriers and the stigma about going to Student Services.”

How To Make An Appointment With Student Services

You can email Student Services here or you can go into Student Services reception and an appointment will be booked for you.