The East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust (EEAST) has become the first organisation in the UK to achieve the British Dyslexia Association’s Gold Dyslexia Friendly Workplace Quality Mark, recognising its long-term commitment to supporting neurodivergent staff and volunteers.
The accreditation marks another milestone in the Trust’s inclusion journey, having previously achieved the Bronze Quality Mark in 2023, Silver in 2024 and the Inclusive Employer Award later that year.
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When Westborough resident Kaitlyn Zogg was young, she struggled to understand why she couldn’t pick up spelling like her peers. At age 10, she was diagnosed with dyslexia, a learning disability that affects a person’s ability to read, write, and spell.
Now 17 and a rising senior at Notre Dame Academy, Zogg has learned to adopt a positive mindset and, working with her parents Matt and Christina, has strengthened her skills considerably. In June, Zogg founded “Soaring With Dyslexia,” an effort to help people dealing with similar challenges thrive. The project helped her earn the Girl Scout Gold Award.
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Key points:
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Dysfunction in neural adaptation to words might be at the core of reading impairment. Children with dyslexia can present difficulties recognizing similarities between repeated linguistic stimuli, as evidenced by a lack of reduced activations (adaptation) in brain regions associated with reading. fMRI Rapid Adaptation (fMRI-RA) provides a sensitive index of the quality of orthographic and phonological representations to some degree independent of the access to those representations. We used fMRI-RA to compare neural adaptation in children (10.01–14.16 y.o.) with dyslexia (DYS; n = 32) and typically reading controls (CON; n = 40). Phonological adaptation was measured in the left temporoparietal cortex (TPC) and orthographic adaptation in the left anterior ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOT). In TPC, the Group × Condition interaction reached trend level. Planned contrasts, conducted based on a priori hypotheses, were nevertheless consistent with greater phonological selectivity in CON than DYS. Both groups showed comparable orthographic adaptation in VOT. These findings suggest a preserved neural adaptation effect for short, easy, high-frequency words in the VOT in dyslexia group. In sum, reading difficulties may reflect not only single modality deficit but also variations in how orthographic and phonological representations are integrated, highlighting the importance of approaches that examine the interaction between these processes.
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The exercises did not replicate dyslexia itself. Instead, they disrupted skills adults, and children without dyslexia or other learning disabilities, normally take for granted — hearing directions, recognizing letters, writing and remembering words — while instructors applied pressure familiar to many classrooms.
Participants rotated through six stations. In one, they attempted to fill out a worksheet on tide pools while listening to a recording of overlapping, muffled voices that dissolved into a blur of numbers, colors and sea creatures. In another, they covered their writing hand and traced letters by watching their movements through a mirror.
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