Dyslexia support in Dubai: a parent's guide

If your child is in a Dubai school and reading is not clicking, the help on offer comes in several kinds: support from the school's inclusion team, a formal assessment at a clinic, and specialist teaching. They do different jobs, and knowing which is which saves months. This guide explains how the pieces fit together in Dubai, what an assessment can and cannot do for you, and then what Flourishing Kids offers Dubai families as one-to-one online dyslexia intervention.

How does dyslexia support work in a Dubai school?

The first conversation is with the class teacher, and the second is with the school's inclusion or learning-support team. Every private school in Dubai is expected to have one, because the emirate's inclusive education policy asks schools to identify and support children with learning differences rather than turn them away. In school documents and on the KHDA's pages you will see the phrase "students of determination" for children with additional needs, and an individual education plan, or IEP, for the support the school agrees to provide.

Support at school usually means small-group phonics, some one-to-one time with a learning-support teacher, and adjusted classroom work. It is real and worth having. It is also shared support: limited hours, spread across many children, moving at the school's pace. For a child whose reading is a year or more behind, it keeps them afloat in the classroom, but it rarely rebuilds the foundations one child at a time. This is as true in a CBSE school as in a British or IB one.

How do families get a dyslexia assessment in Dubai?

A formal diagnostic assessment in Dubai comes from an educational or clinical psychologist, usually at a private assessment or child development clinic. Your school's inclusion team is the natural first stop: it can usually name assessors whose reports the school already trusts, and some schools ask for an updated report every few years to keep a child on their support register. The assessment takes several hours across one or two visits, the report follows a few weeks later, and it is a significant expense that health insurance in the UAE generally treats as educational rather than medical, so most families pay privately.

Some Indian-origin families prefer to have the assessment done in India during a family visit. That can work, but confirm with your school beforehand that it will accept a report from the centre you have in mind. Whoever does it, the report describes your child's profile and almost always recommends the same thing: structured, multisensory teaching, delivered consistently by a specialist. The fuller picture of what an assessment involves is in how to get a child assessed for dyslexia.

What happens after the assessment?

This is the gap that surprises parents. The assessment tells you what is going on, and it unlocks the school's support plan and, later, exam access arrangements. But the report does not teach your child to read. The recommendation says structured teaching by a specialist, and finding that specialist is left to you. Dubai has many clinics and learning centres, most of them busy, and the day-to-day work of intervention runs for months, not weeks. Whoever you choose, the questions worth asking are the same: is the teaching one-to-one, is it structured and cumulative, and will the same specialist stay with your child from start to finish?

What does Flourishing Kids offer Dubai families?

Flourishing Kids is a one-specialist practice built around exactly that day-to-day work: structured, explicit, multisensory teaching in the Orton-Gillingham tradition, delivered one-to-one online from India.

One specialist, every session. Every session, from the first assessment to the last lesson, is taught personally by Dr. V.S. Gayathri, a Dyslexia Therapist, Orton-Gillingham trained, with 4,000+ hours of one-to-one intervention. The same person who assesses your child teaches your child, for the whole programme.

The whole child. Her background in counselling (M.Sc. in Counselling and Psychotherapy) shapes how sessions handle the part of dyslexia that worksheets miss: the anxiety, avoidance and bruised confidence a child carries after years of struggling with print.

Already have a report? Start from it. If your child has a detailed diagnostic report, Dr. Gayathri plans the teaching from that report; the Reading & Spelling Snapshot is not needed. If you do not have an assessment yet, the Snapshot shows exactly where reading and spelling break down, so the teaching starts in the right place.

One-to-one, online, anywhere in Dubai. Sessions run over Zoom, so it makes no difference whether you are in Al Barsha, Jumeirah, Bur Dubai, Mirdif or Sharjah: no commute, no waiting list tied to a clinic. Dubai is an hour and a half behind India, so sessions fit Dubai after-school and early-evening hours and Friday afternoons, with times agreed with each family. Children stay in their regular school while sessions of 45 to 60 minutes run three to four times a week, paced by mastery. Families across India, the UAE, Oman, Singapore, Australia, the UK and the US learn this way; their stories are on the testimonials page, and what a session actually looks like is in what happens in online dyslexia intervention.

The first step is the Reading & Spelling Snapshot, an informal reading and spelling assessment: Rs 5,000 for families in India, USD 150 for families outside India. Or start with a free 15-minute conversation with Dr. Gayathri.

Common questions