Dyslexia may explain my school failure, says Annabel Heseltine

Annabel Heseltine, the daughter of Tory grandee Lord Heseltine, will tell the Girls' Schools Association that although boys are disproportionately identified with dyslexia, research suggests the learning difficulty is as common in girls.

Ms Heseltine, whose daughter and three sons as well as her brother and father all have the condition, believes she too may be dyslexic and is considering having a diagnostic test.

"It was only when I came across some old school reports of mine and saw various comments about lack of development, lack of co-ordination of ideas and an inability to communicate properly, that I thought I may well have mild dyslexia," said the 48 year-old, editor of First Eleven magazine, for parents with children in independent schools.

"When I was 15 my headmistresses called me in and said 'what about doing home economics, needle work and how's your art?" And I was bad at art. I was furious."

She left her girls boarding school and went to Stowe School, in Buckinghamshire which took girls in the sixth form. She achieved a B, a C, and two Ds in her A-levels, which she described as "atrocious by today's standards".

"If somebody said I was dyslexic now it would come as a huge relief because it would explain the frustration that I carried through my academic or non-academic career," she said.

Although her only daughter Isabella, nine, is an avid reader, she has been diagnosed with dyslexia and is receiving extra help at school.

Ms Heseltine will tell head teachers to consider dyslexia if they are presented with a girl who is a late developer or not achieving her full potential.

"Why is it that when some studies show dyslexia does not favour a gender so few girls, relative to boys, are being put forward," she said.

"If you follow through that argument, there must be more girls out there with undiagnosed dyslexia.

"Girls tend to be more diligent, they are more responsible and hard working. It may be that dyslexia manifests itself differently in girls.

"There is no one dyslexic who is the same as another. But it needs to be picked up on as early as possible because if you are not achieving what you feel you can achieve, you are going to be frustrated and lose confidence."

One in ten people in the UK - including 375,000 schoolchildren - has been diagnosed with dyslexia. Three times as many boys as girls receive additional teaching because of it.

Symptoms include delayed speech development in younger children and problems with phonics, spelling, writing and reading. Victims can suffer from muddled thinking and short-term memory loss.

The evidence on whether there is a gender difference in the incidence of dyslexia is inconclusive.

Major US studies in the last 20 years from Yale University, in Connecticut, Bowman Gray University, in North Carolina, and Colorado University, show girls and boys are equally effected.

However, research from the universities of Warwick, Coventry and Kings College, London, which examined four large-scale studies of reading in 10,000 children in Britain and New Zealand indicated that up to 22 per cent of boys were dyslexic compared to up to 13 per cent of girls.

Some critics claim the condition is used as a label by middle class families to disguise low achievement.

Julian Elliott, an educational psychologist at Durham University, claims he has found no evidence to identify dyslexia as a medical condition after more than 30 years of research.

Ms Heseltine said: "I am just as sceptical about it as the next person but when I follow it through, and I have the evidence of my own daughter in front of me, it does make me question things.

"Perhaps middle class parents are more easily able to do something about it."