For over fifteen years I have been saying the same thing: the vast majority of children labelled “dyslexic” in English-speaking countries are not dyslexic at all. They are intelligent kids who shut down because they were taught reading in a way that created confusion. Once the confusion is removed, they read. I have seen it happen with more than eighty children I taught one-to-one between 2004 and 2019.Yet every year the numbers keep rising. In the US, UK, Australia and many other places, 10 % to 20 % of children are now being told they have dyslexia. That cannot be right. A real neurobiological condition that affects the way the brain processes spoken sounds should not suddenly explode to one in five children just because we changed the way we label it.
Singapore shows us the truth. The Singapore Evidence:
In the 2022 PISA reading test, 15-year-olds in Singapore scored 543 points. The OECD average was 476. That is not a small difference – it is world-beating. Even more telling: 89 % of Singapore students reached at least Level 2 proficiency in reading (the OECD average is only 74 %). Very few Singapore students are left behind.
Now look at the official dyslexia numbers from Singapore’s Ministry of Education. Based on data from 2016 to 2019, only 3.5 % of Primary 3 students were reported as having dyslexia. The MOE itself says this figure sits comfortably within the international range of 3 % to 10 %. Compare that with the 10–15 % or higher figures routinely quoted in Western countries and in places like Malaysia.
Same children, same human brains, same age. One education system produces top-of-the-world reading performance and a low reported dyslexia rate. The others produce far more struggling readers and far more labels. Why?
Prevention Beats Remediation:
Singapore does not wait until children fail and then label them. From kindergarten and the earliest years of primary school they deliver explicit, systematic phonics and phonemic awareness instruction that is consistent across schools. Teachers are trained and supported to get the foundations right the first time.
Most importantly, they avoid the instructional mistakes that create artificial failure in many English-speaking classrooms:
Children are taught pure consonant sounds (/b/, /d/, /f/) instead of the confusing “buh”, “duh”, “fuh” that make blending impossible.
They build automatic recognition of high-frequency words early.
They move to word families and structured practice once the basic code is secure.
The entire system is designed to prevent confusion rather than to remediate it later.
The result?
Most children who might have been labelled “dyslexic” in other countries never become struggling readers in the first place. The true, hard-core cases that persist even with perfect teaching remain a small minority – roughly the 2–5 % range I have been talking about for years.
What I Saw in My Own Teaching
I quit my job as an accountant in 2004 specifically to find out why so many bright children could not read English. Over the next fifteen years I worked with more than eighty of them, many already labelled dyslexic. Almost every single one could read Malay (a transparent language with consistent sound–letter links) or Pinyin without difficulty. The moment we switched to pure sounds, stopped the extraneous vowels, and built automaticity with high-frequency words, the “dyslexia” disappeared.
One child after another went from refusing to read, stomach aches before school, and “can’t blend” to fluent, confident reading within a handful of lessons. These were not miracles. They were simply the removal of confusion that never should have been introduced. That is exactly what Singapore does at scale.
The Inflation Problem:
When you inflate the dyslexia label to 10–20 %, two things happen. First, you waste enormous resources on children who do not need specialist intervention – they just need correct initial teaching. Second, you dilute attention and funding for the small group who really do have a persistent phonological processing deficit that resists even the best instruction.
Joe Torgesen spent his career working with that genuine hard-core group. He never claimed it was 15–20 % of the population. The numbers have been pushed upward by vested interests: more diagnoses mean more funding, more programmes, more “experts”, more assessments. The dyslexia industry has grown fat on preventable cases.
Singapore refuses to play that game. They teach properly from the start, keep the real numbers low, and let almost every child succeed.
This Is Not Theory. This is observable reality. Kids who read Malay and Pinyin fluently but struggle in English cannot have a primary phonological awareness deficit. Their sound-processing system works fine when the teaching is clean.
When the same children are re-taught with pure sounds and structured practice, they read English fluently too.
A country that applies clean, consistent early instruction at national scale ends up with world-leading PISA results and one of the lowest reported dyslexia rates.
The conclusion is unavoidable: the majority of what we currently call “dyslexia” in English-speaking countries is preventable. It is not a brain wiring problem in most cases. It is an instructional problem.
Singapore has proved it for more than a decade.
If one small island nation can prevent the reading failure epidemic that plagues much of the West, every other country can too. All it takes is the willingness to teach the code correctly the first time instead of labelling the casualties later.
Next: Why the same children who read transparent languages without trouble suddenly “become dyslexic” in English – and what that tells us about the real cause.
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