Hip hop, not phonics

I remember being asked during my dyslexia assessment to use the word “torrent” in a sentence. I said, “Their words hit me like a torrent.” The assessor told me that wasn’t the correct use, that torrent had nothing to do with language, and everything to do with weather. 

In hindsight, that moment wasn’t just a misunderstanding, it highlights something much deeper. In the 1980s, this misunderstanding could’ve landed me labeled as  “educationally subnormal” understanding intelligence against a narrow, culturally specific lens. The kind of lens that refuses to recognise metaphor, or multiple ways of knowing. 

We’ve all heard the line about judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree—but this isn’t even that. This is misidentifying the fish altogether. Diagnosing young people with hip hop lexicons as broken, while letting high-achieving girls with ADHD go unsupported because their grades hide the struggle. 

And in that moment, I was handed another: profoundly dyslexic. But using the word that way made perfect sense to me. Because that’s how I’ve always built language—not only from textbooks, but from hip hop. From punchlines and poetry, not phonics. So you have DMX, Biggie, and Lauryn Hill to thank for my occasionally poetic prose and hopefully helpful analogies.

The redemption arc isn’t enough 

Watching Jamie Oliver’s recent documentary, ‘Jamie’s Dyslexia Revolution,’ I recognised the struggle. The shame. The frustration of feeling stupid in a system not built for you. But I also saw something else: a story we’ve heard before. The heroic individual. The diagnosis-as-redemption arc. The belief that if we just spot the ‘right’ kids early enough, we can funnel them back onto the path to success. It’s not malicious. It’s just familiar. And that’s exactly the problem.

What happens when a child is all of the above?

Let’s talk about the numbers. Jamie repeats a powerful stat: children with dyslexia are three and a half times more likely to be excluded. But here’s what the documentary doesn’t say: so are Black boys. And free school meal  students are five times more likely to be permanently excluded.  So what happens when a child is some of those things—or all of them?  I’m sure Albert McEyeson would agree that his path to prison was shaped in part by his dyslexia but also by how he was racialised and classed. These forces don’t stack neatly. They collide. They collude to produce negative outcomes, but compete when we try to fix them. We slice young people into categories as if one part of their identity can be supported while the others are ignored. So no, the answer isn’t more or earlier screening. It’s a new way of seeing. One that recognises the full picture through an intersectional lens.

Same logic

Instead, we get a polite taxonomy, a sorting system dressed up as support that echoes older, crueller ones fabricated by people like Carl Linnaeus. He classified the “Africanus” as governed by caprice—by sudden, unpredictable changes in mood or behaviour. That logic hasn’t disappeared. It’s simply been repackaged. Today, we pathologise some children’s behaviour, especially racialised children. “Give them something to do” becomes the mantra, because we—and Carl—have already decided they can’t be trusted to steer themselves. 

The safe route to reform

Jamie means well. But reaching for long-debunked ideas like learning styles shows exactly why politicians return his calls. He’s safe. He won’t ask uncomfortable questions about who schools were built for in the first place. He won’t talk about race, or austerity, or the fact that we keep handing celebrity chefs the mic while youth workers get laid off.

Let’s be clear: the issue isn’t Jamie Oliver highlighting the need for greater support for children, or Idris Elba trying to end knife crime. The issue is that we keep getting hopeful every time a celebrity steps up to a mic, as if spotlight equals solution. The system keeps mistaking personal success stories for systemic change. Me going into schools to talk about my degree classification or professional accomplishments might inspire someone, but it doesn’t disrupt the structures that made success feel exceptional in the first place. (And please, stop asking.)

And since social capital is having its moment, let’s be clear about what it actually means. Pierre Bourdieu used it to describe the invisible currency we gain not just from what we know, but from who we know, and how they’re seen. He warned about the miraculé—the so-called success stories who are paraded as proof the system is fair. But here’s the trick: the system needs the miracle student. It creates just enough of them to protect itself. To suggest that failure is an individual flaw—not a structural certainty.

The path to the miracle story is paved with unacknowledged privilege, low expectations for others, and just enough support at just the right time. That’s not a revolution. That’s rationed luck.

A better diagnosis

At Class 13, we’re not campaigning for better diagnoses. We’re campaigning for a different diagnosis entirely—one that starts with the school, not the student. One that sees exclusion not as a behaviour issue, but as a failure of belonging. One that recognises that no single child is ‘profoundly’ anything—they are profoundly human. And they deserve a system that treats them that way.

So maybe the real question isn’t how to spot dyslexic children earlier. Maybe it’s this: why are our schools still so easy to drown in?