The problem is rarely the child.

A child arrives in the practice room because someone has decided something is wrong.

Often it is a teacher. Sometimes a paediatrician. Sometimes a parent who has been quietly worried for a year. Almost always, by the time the child sits down in front of me, they already know they have been brought somewhere because of something they cannot do. They have read it on a face. They have heard the worried voice through a door. They are seven, and they already know.

The first thing I tell most parents on a discovery call is that the framing they have been handed is almost certainly wrong. Not because the teacher is wrong, or the paediatrician is wrong — they have usually noticed something real. The framing is wrong because it has located the problem inside the child.

It is rarely there.

— 01 / What "remedial" actually means.

The word remedial is not, in its original sense, about fixing a child. It is about meeting a learner where the system has not. A child who has not learned to read by the end of Grade 2 is not, in the overwhelming majority of cases, broken. They have been moved through a curriculum that did not fit the way they take in information, and the gaps that opened in Grade R quietly compounded across two more years.

Remedial teaching is the work of going back to those gaps — not as a punishment, but as a permission. A child gets to learn the thing they didn't see the first time, in the way they actually need to see it, at the speed they actually need to go. Most of them, given that, get there.

— 02 / What I do in the room.

The first session is almost never about reading or writing. It is about working out where the gap is. Sometimes the answer is phonological — the child has not heard the inside of a word, and so the letters on the page are noise. Sometimes it is visual-perceptual — the child has not built the mental machinery for tracking left to right across a line. Sometimes it is motor — a hand that cannot yet form a letter cannot yet remember a letter. Sometimes it is none of these and the answer is that the child has been moving through school anxious for nine months, and the anxiety has occupied the room where the learning would otherwise sit.

Each of these has a different next step. None of them is "the child is broken." All of them are addressable, and almost all of them are addressable in Foundation Phase, which is why I work where I work.

— 03 / What this means for parents.

If your child has been flagged for remedial — or you are quietly worried but no-one has used the word yet — the framing that is most likely to help is not "what is wrong with my child?" It is "what does my child need that they have not yet been given?" Most of the time the answer to that second question is concrete, specific, and reachable inside a school term or two.

That is why the practice opens with a conversation, not a screening. Twenty minutes on the phone, no card, no commitment. We talk through what you are seeing — at home, at school, in homework battles — and decide together whether a screening session is the right next step. Sometimes the answer is "wait six months and revisit." Sometimes the answer is a referral to a paediatric OT or an educational psychologist before any remedial work begins. The conversation is the diagnostic for which way is right.

What it isn't, and won't be, is a verdict on your child.

Slow on purpose. Bellavista-trained. The practice room is in Ballito.