Funding bids

I have 6 new funding bids to write over the next few weeks. I have done this before and made several successful funding bids in the past. The project I am most proud of was, "Breaking the Barriers of Dyslexia". I did this whilst I was working as co-ordinator for dyslexia at a college in London. I put together the project in response to a number of factors.

Whilst working there I started afternoon dyslexia surgerys for students and staff. It was very successful and the surgerys were always busy. Many of the teachers who came to see me had concerns about their own dyslexia or about the possibility they were dyslexic. one of them knew about the Access to Work scheme managed by Jobcentres.

I was also finding that many male students were just not accessing dyslexia support services at all. The numbers of female students were much higher. As a result I went out into the college to aks students about their perceptions of dyslexia. I have to say their perceptions were not very positive at all particularly amongst male students. I had even had a few teachers approaching me telling me in no uncertain terms what they thought about dyslexia such as they didn't believe it existed.

The profile of dyslexia at the college itself was not high at all. When I got the job as Co-ordinator for dyslexia I was the only full time member of staff providing dyslexia support. There was one other part time member. This was at a college spread over four different sites with a student population of around 10.000. There was not a place for us to work with students and prior to myself taking dyslexia support staff had to walk around the college looking for a quiet class room to work with students in. The college hired me to change this and to be fair I was given free reign and support to change this situation. By the time I left each site had its own dyslexia support room and the team had expanded to two full time staff and three part time.

The basic idea behind, "Breaking the Barriers to Dyslexia", was to provide access to free dyslexia screening, dyslexia assessment and training it dyslexia friendly work practises to staff at the college. It was a 12 week project and my project proposal was accepted and fully funded by the Learning and Skills Counscil in London. At the start we had target to screen 100 members of staff in the end we screened nearly 200. We had a target to provide dyslexia assessments to 8 staff and we ended up assessing 23 staff. We provided training to all assessed staff in dyslexia friendy work stratagies and support with applications for Access to Work funding. Moreover, we had a co-hort of staff who were able to act as mentors and role models to students at the college.

It was a very successful project and one that needs to be repeated in every school, college, university and training provider in the UK.