We don’t need to tell you this: tech is expensive. Keeping up to date with the latest gadgets can put a serious dent in your wallet, but the price tag doesn’t do much to quell our desires for a new phone.
Available for pre-order now, and to buy from 20 August, the Pixel 11 Pro comes in four shades (Canyon pink, Olive green, Fog blue and Obsidian black).
The phone retails at £1,079, which is up nearly £500 from the Pixel 10. But, good news Google heads: you can get it for less when you trade in an old device.
Eligible devices include phones from Google, Samsung, and Apple, among tons of other brands, so if you’ve been thinking about switching to Google, this is as good a chance as any.
Depending on the phone you’re trading, you could save up to £850, which in case you need a little help with the maths, means your new phone could cost as little as £229. Woah.
When you consider the array of upgrades Google has made from its predecessor, the Pixel 10, that’s an insane steal.
The first Google phone to use its Tensor G6 chip, it’s considerably speedier than the Pixel 10, with Google claiming you’ll see 25% speedier browsing and 3.5 times faster Gemini processing.
Speaking of, the Pixel 11 Pro is loaded with Gemini Intelligence, which can help you with everything from brainstorming to finding information.
The camera is often the most important aspect of a phone (for us, at least) and this one delivers big time. Pixel 11 boasts Google’s longest zoom yet (up to a whopping 120x) and 30% better light sensitivity so your photos always come out looking crisp and sharp.
One of our favourite elements is Magic Capture mode, which means you can simply press a single button to let your phone take over the heavy lifting of taking photos and videos, so you don’t have to think about the best mode to capture the moment.
The offer runs until 1 September, so run, don’t walk – because you could miss out on £850 in savings on the Pixel 11 Pro as well as up to £260 when you trade in a smart watch for the new Google Pixel Watch 5.
We don’t need to tell you this: tech is expensive. Keeping up to date with the latest gadgets can put a serious dent in your wallet, but the price tag doesn’t do much to quell our desires for a new phone.
Available for pre-order now, and to buy from 20 August, the Pixel 11 Pro comes in four shades (Canyon pink, Olive green, Fog blue and Obsidian black).
The phone retails at £1,079, which is up nearly £500 from the Pixel 10. But, good news Google heads: you can get it for less when you trade in an old device.
Eligible devices include phones from Google, Samsung, and Apple, among tons of other brands, so if you’ve been thinking about switching to Google, this is as good a chance as any.
Depending on the phone you’re trading, you could save up to £850, which in case you need a little help with the maths, means your new phone could cost as little as £229. Woah.
When you consider the array of upgrades Google has made from its predecessor, the Pixel 10, that’s an insane steal.
The first Google phone to use its Tensor G6 chip, it’s considerably speedier than the Pixel 10, with Google claiming you’ll see 25% speedier browsing and 3.5 times faster Gemini processing.
Speaking of, the Pixel 11 Pro is loaded with Gemini Intelligence, which can help you with everything from brainstorming to finding information.
The camera is often the most important aspect of a phone (for us, at least) and this one delivers big time. Pixel 11 boasts Google’s longest zoom yet (up to a whopping 120x) and 30% better light sensitivity so your photos always come out looking crisp and sharp.
One of our favourite elements is Magic Capture mode, which means you can simply press a single button to let your phone take over the heavy lifting of taking photos and videos, so you don’t have to think about the best mode to capture the moment.
The offer runs until 1 September, so run, don’t walk – because you could miss out on £850 in savings on the Pixel 11 Pro as well as up to £260 when you trade in a smart watch for the new Google Pixel Watch 5.
You can breathe a big sigh of relief: we’re half way through the summer holidays (unless you’re in Scotland, sorry Scotland!).
While you might have set strict no-screen rules at the beginning of the summer holidays, we’re sure you’re getting to the point of easing up.
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And no one would blame you – it’s a long time to have the whole family under one roof.
All you have to do is get through the next few weeks – and if that means plonking them down to play games or talk to their friends as a distraction, so be it.
At the same time, though, there is plenty to think about when giving your child access to the internet. I don’t need to recount the potential horrors, because over 90% of parents on Mumsnet say current smartphones aren’t safe enough for children.
Plus, 77% of parents say keeping their child safe online feels like an impossible task, and that only gets harder in summer when they don’t have the school routine to keep them busy.
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If you’re just about wondering when someone’s going to do something about this mess, enter: the OtherPhone.
Responding to readers’ concerns, the team at Mumsnet teamed up with two London-based tech companies – Nothing and SafetyMode – to create a phone catered to keeping kids safe online.
It might look like a regular phone, but it’s actually a cool phone – that is, the 3(a) phone from cult brand Nothing – that your kid will love (all you need to know is that Charli XCX is the ambassador).
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The phone is super lightweight, coated in tempered glass, and is dust and water-resistant, so it can handle the muck and clutter of being a kid.
Loaded with all the regular functions of a smart phone, this particular phone also comes with SafetyMode, a software that uses AI to monitor, filter and block harmful content (like bullying, nudity, and explicit language) across every app your child uses.
While safety tools track a list of basic keywords, or block specific websites, SafetyMode has been trained to read content, which means it can distinguish between a normal conversation and a concerning one.
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It can track their locations, and the filters are fully customisable, so you get to decide what you want your child accessing, based on their changing needs.
When troubling content is detected, SafetyMode will send an alert straight to your phone, so that you can rest assured you’ll know what your child is up to online, even when you’re not in the same room (or home!).
Even better, your child’s data won’t ever leave their phone, as all of the processing happens on the phone itself, for added privacy.
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If you don’t want to buy a whole new phone, you don’t have to. SafetyMode is also available via the Google Play store to be compatible with any Android device.
The app itself is free, but if you want to manage permissions and filters without even having to pick up their phone, you can upgrade and pay £5.99 per month for SafetyMode Plus.
That means online safety for the rest of the summer, whether they’re at summer camp, the grandparents’, or simply curled up in their rooms.
You’ve probably sent and opened thousands of PDFs over the years. But if someone asked you right now what PDF actually stands for, would you know the answer?
You’re not alone if you don’t. The word has become so embedded in everyday language that most people use it the way they use terms like “Wi-Fi” and “pm” ― automatically and without any particular thought about what the letters mean.
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But it’s never too late to learn the answer to that mystery, as well as the interesting history behind those three letters. (And no, it doesn’t stand for “Please Download Fast” or “Pretty Delightful File.”)
“PDF stands for ‘portable document format,’ though I’m not sure anyone knows or cares anymore,” said Lisa Gitelman, a media historian and professor at New York University. “’PDF’ stands as the name of a digital file format on its own.”
“The keyword is ‘portable’ because the format was designed to keep a document looking exactly the same, no matter which computer, operating system or device it was opened on,” said Madeline Enos, a language trends expert at the language learning app Preply.
“Before PDFs became widespread, sharing documents could be frustrating because fonts, images and layouts often changed depending on the software being used. The PDF solved that problem by preserving the original formatting, which is why it’s still one of the most trusted file formats over 30 years later.”
The origins of the PDF go back to 1991, when Adobe Systems co-founder John Warnock proposed a project called “Camelot” with the goal of developing a simplified way to view and print any document across devices and platforms, regardless of the software or hardware used to create it.
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“At the time, the web was far less standardised than it is today, so creating a document that looked identical everywhere was revolutionary,” Enos noted.
Warnock’s Camelot project culminated two years after his original proposal, with the release of PDF 1.0, bundled with the first version of Adobe Acrobat.
merovingian via Getty Images
The origins of the PDF go back to the early 1990s.
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“PDF first appeared in the marketplace in 1993,” said Duff Johnson, CEO of the PDF Association. “Adobe, which invented PDF, continued its development until 2007, at which point the specification for PDF was handed to ISO for international standardization as a vendor-neutral technology.”
As the online environment has evolved significantly since the ’90s, so too has the PDF, Gitelman noted. Still, the file format remains an important standard.
“I once wrote an essay laying out four reasons for its enormous success,” Gitelman said. “First, PDFs offer page images – like facsimiles, like xeroxes, like microfilm, unlike word processing files or most proprietary eBook formats. This means they feel stable. They retain layout as well as content. Second, as page images, they are handy in publication workflows. Every book, every analog publication, has been a PDF somewhere in its life history. Third, they are easily transmissible across digital networks, even in low-bandwidth environments.”
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The fourth and final reason: PDFs are searchable, she added.
Today, people still use the term PDF in everyday conversation, particularly in the context of work.
“We’ve certainly noticed that ‘PDF’ is used synonymously with ‘document’ and ‘file,’ as in ‘I sent him a PDF’ and ‘The email includes three PDFs,’” Johnson noted. “But the industry accepts such usage as the price of ubiquity.”
Many people also say “PDF file,” which is not quite redundant, as in the case of “PIN number” or “ATM machine.” But the term PDF does stand alone.
“Most people don’t stop to mentally unpack what the letters stand for, so adding ‘file’ simply makes the meaning clearer,” Enos said.
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Still, the meaning is quite clear to most people these days.
“Most acronyms stay within specialist industries, but PDF made the rare jump into everyday language. Today, people don’t just recognise the letters – they also use ‘PDF’ as a verb,” Enos said. “It’s increasingly common to hear someone say ‘Can you PDF it?’ or ‘Just PDF that document,’ showing how technical abbreviations can become everyday words over time.”
This is a process known as lexicalisation, as the abbreviation became so familiar that it was accepted as a normal standalone word in the English language.
“While countless digital buzzwords have come and gone over the past three decades, ‘PDF’ has remained relevant because it describes a format rather than a trend,” Enos said.
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The meaning of PDF has hardly changed over time, and it has gone international as well.
“PDF is one of the few digital abbreviations that has become almost completely language-independent,” Enos said. “Whether you’re in the UK, Japan, Brazil or Germany, the acronym ‘PDF’ is almost always recognised and rarely translated.”
Thus, PDF has essentially become a universal language in some ways.
“It’s a good example of how technology creates a shared international vocabulary,” Enos said. “Even people who don’t speak the same language often understand terms like PDF, Wi-Fi, USB and GPS, making them some of the closest things we have to truly global words.”
Plenty of parents share photos, videos and details of their children’s lives online – usually on social media or in private groups – a phenomenon known as ‘sharenting’.
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But this increasingly comes at a cost. Other children and teens can easily find these photos online and then turn them into cruel memes, deepfake videos (some of which can be pornographic) or share them around school to cause embarrassment.
Lorraine Candy, a journalist and author of ‘Mum, What’s Wrong with You?’: 101 Things Only Mothers of Teenage Girls Know, shared: “I think we need to go back and delete all the pictures we have ever shared – even in private Facebook groups or on private WhatsApp channels – of our children when they were younger.”
Explaining the reasoning for this statement, she said when kids reach their tween and teen years, those photos on social media are “landmines” for them and it can be “really upsetting” that other people can see them and they might get shared around.
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“Imagine your worst teenage bully at school, imagine your worst friendship group where you feel very insecure and vulnerable, imagine them having access to pictures of you in a bath when you were a baby, to posts about you having a poo,” she said in an Instagram reel.
The author continued: “I know you can say it’s in a private group, it won’t get shared. [But] It does get screenshot, it does get shared. Other children have access to their parents’ private groups.”
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Candy, who has four children, noted it’s “really important to a developing mind, as a teenager, that they don’t have these little bombs going off in the background emotionally as they’re developing their identity and their autonomy and their privacy”.
Plenty of people resonated with the post. “I mentor teenagers and would always recommend that parents do this. Online photos can cause all sorts of issues further down the line,” said one commenter.
“I’ve thought about this a lot over the years. I’ll have the conversation with my 12-year-old son this weekend and see how he feels about it. It’ll be so difficult to erase them because my Instagram is like a memory book of his childhood!” added another parent.
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One mum recalled how she received a “barrage of requests” from her daughter’s friends to connect with her on Instagram (back when her daughter was 13).
“When I asked my daughter she said they were only sending these requests to access pics of her when she was younger – for jokes, basically. It was a real moment of enlightenment for me,” she added.
It’s not just bullying and deepfake creation that can be an issue as a result of sharenting. Images – whether real or fake – can also be used to intimidate or blackmail teenagers, as well as to commit identity theft and fraud.
Parents have opened up about the dangers of leaving kids to their own devices on their devices, after a viral post showed how easily a child was able to spend their parents’ money while using their iPad.
In January, parenting influencers Cole and Abbie shared their son had been on a secret shopping spree on their iPad, paying for a load of Apple services. “I didn’t think it was possible without my Face ID but here we are. Massive lesson learnt,” wrote the influencers at the time.
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They weren’t the only ones to fall victim to it, either.
In response to Cole and Abbie’s misfortune, one commenter said: “It’s a parental right of passage to have your bank account cleared by a threenager. Mine did it on Amazon through the Alexa buying fart sounds.”
Another said: “My son wanted a rabbit so, while playing games on my phone, went on to Amazon and brought a hutch for £150, didn’t realised till it turned up at my door… and his answer was ‘can I have my rabbit now?’.”
“Been there done that!” added another parent, noting their child had purchased 100 fidget toys and 100 lip balms. Eek.
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With kids still off school, experts from Protect Your Bubble are urging parents to check one particular setting on their devices to stop their bank accounts from accidentally being emptied.
James Brown, director at Protect Your Bubble, said: “It’s easy to assume that payments need passwords or additional approval; however, many devices and accounts allow instant spending once a card is saved to the account.”
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He continued: “From a child’s perspective, it doesn’t feel like spending real money; however, for parents, it can mean hundreds, or even thousands, disappearing before they notice.”
How to stop kids from spending all your money online
First of all, turn off one-touch payments on devices and require approval for every purchase. “This single change can stop accidental spending instantly, and it takes less than two minutes to set up,” Brown said.
Households using Apple devices with Family Sharing set up should also turn on Ask to Buy, which blocks all purchases until they are approved.
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Games consoles are also an easy way to wrack up debt. Brown noted they are “often overlooked, despite being one of the biggest risks”.
“Saved card details on PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo accounts can lead to purchases stacking up quickly,” he noted.
The expert recommends removing saved payment cards from accounts and setting monthly spending limits in console settings. You can also enable PINs or passwords for purchases.
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“Consoles are where costs could spiral fastest,” he ended. “Prevention is far easier than trying to recover the money afterwards, and this is one of the most important tech checks parents can make this winter.”
In a bid to improve the wellbeing of young users, YouTube has revealed parents will now be able to set time limits for scrolling Shorts, and will also enable caregivers to set bedtime and break reminders.
Parents will be able to set limits for scrolling Shorts
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As part of the Online Safety Act, social media companies have a duty to protect children and stop them from accessing harmful or age-inappropriate content. Sites can face fines or be blocked in the UK if they don’t take protective steps.
The social media and online video sharing platform is also launching new ‘Quality Principles’ for content creators, developed alongside experts, to ensure videos created for teens are “age-appropriate” and “enriching”.
What are the quality principles?
Professor Peter Fonagy, head of the division of psychology and language sciences at UCL, which partnered with YouTube to provide evidence-based insights on adolescent development, said: “The mental health of children and young people is a global concern, and in the digital age the content teens encounter online can have both positive and negative impacts.”
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He said the new quality principles will give creators a “practical, research-informed roadmap for making videos that are developmentally appropriate, emotionally safe, and genuinely supportive of young people”.
The principles include:
Joy, fun and entertainment: Show humour and warmth that lift teens’ moods like a day-in-the-life video or funny, self-accepting outtakes.
Curiosity and inspiration: Encourage exploration through creative tutorials, behind-the-scenes demos, or new hobbies that are easy to try.
Deepening interests and perspectives: Create deeper dives into subjects teens love, like music, gaming, or fashion, and show process, not just outcomes.
Building life skills and experiences: Offer relatable guidance for real-life moments, like teamwork or budgeting, to help them prepare for the future.
Credible information that supports well-being: Share accurate, age-appropriate information. Use trusted sources and avoid spreading misinformation.
Tell me more about the screentime limits…
YouTube said parents will be able to set time limits for scrolling Shorts – including having the option to set the timer to zero.
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This gives parents flexibility to set the Shorts feed limit to zero when they want their teen to use YouTube to focus on homework, for example.
Or they could change it to 60 minutes during a long car trip to keep kids entertained.
This has been designed to make it easier for parents to create a new kid account and switch between family accounts in the mobile app, depending on who’s watching, so they’re shown the most appropriate content for their age.
Dr Garth Graham, global head of YouTube Health, said: “We believe in protecting kids in the digital world, not from the digital world. That’s why providing effective, built-in tools is so essential, as parents play a critical role in setting the rules for their family’s online experiences.”
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According to the social media giant, the updates will be rolling out from 14 January and will expand globally over the coming months.
Much of the internet has been experiencing issues today as tech company Cloudflare suffered a major technical problem.
X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT are some of the sites which could not show all of their content when the problems arose.
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A spokesperson for Cloudflare told The Guardian earlier today that they “saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20am”.
This then “caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors”, they noted.
“While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services.
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“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”
But what is Cloudflare to begin with, and why does it affect so much of the internet if the company experiences an issue?
It helps sites to manage and secure internet traffic, ensures that the content of lots of sites can load safely, and protects sites from malicious attacks.
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In layman’s terms, Cloudflare works behind the scenes to get the content sites want to give us to our screens safely.
Why do Cloudflare issues affect so much of the internet?
As we mentioned, the company helps to deliver a lot of the web’s content.
So when it’s down, or if it experiences technical problems, it doesn’t just affect one company.
As a result, Cloudflare hiccups can have knock-on effects on multiple sites.
Which sites are affected by Cloudflare issues?
ChatGPT, X, and some transit sites (reportedly, the New Jersey transit system was affected, for instance) appeared to experience issues which may be linked to Cloudflare’s tech problems.
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Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, online game League of Legends, Moody’s and NJ Transit also had problems today.
There may be many other sites involved, too (TechRadar, for instance, reported its internal HR system was affected).
When will the Cloudflare outage be fixed?
We don’t yet know when all of the problems will be fixed as of the time of writing.
You know exhaustion over artificial intelligence has reached a pinnacle when people start coming up with slurs to talk about robots.
While there are a number of contenders for dissing AI (and people who slavishly make it a part of their everyday lives), so far, the pejorative front-runner is “clankers,” a term that’s straight out of the Star Wars universe.
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If you’re not a Star Wars devotee, all you really have to know is that clanker is a slang term used to refer to semiconscious droids in the 2005 video game Republic Commando, and more pervasively in the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. (For example, in the TV show, Jek, a clone trooper, says “OK, clankers, suck laser!” to some battle droids before shooting them.)
Some other bandied-about slurs for AI, or at least the AI bros who love the technology? Bot-licker, Grokkers (Grok is the AI chatbot developed by xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company) and clanker wanker (naturally).
“Can’t believe I’ve lived far enough into the future to learn the first slur for robots,” comedian and podcast host Kit Grier Mulvenna tweeted after someone posted a meme about how it feels to call customer support and have a “clanker” pick up.
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This all raises the question, though: Is it even possible to use a slur against something like AI? (Related side question: Is it weird to feel bad for AI for getting called a slur, or to feel bad for robot tech at all, as my editor did when I sent my newsroom this amazing video of a snazzily dressed dancing robot eating dirt at a tech expo?)
Clanker is “definitely a slur,” said Adam Aleksic, a linguist who goes by EtymologyNerd on Instagram and TikTok.
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Aleksic, who’s the author of Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, finds the usage interesting because it requires anthropomorphization for it to work. (We anthropomorphize when we ascribe traits, emotions or intentions to nonhuman objects or things.)
“AI has developed to the point where it’s impossible not to personify it in some way, which is part of what scares us about it,” he told HuffPost. “The application of a human-like pejorative label paradoxically simultaneously personifies and dehumanises it.”
Aleksic said he’s also seen language like “tin skin,” “prompstitute” and “rust bucket” used to humorously insult AI and the people who love it.
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Illustration: HuffPost
Clankers is a slang term used to refer to droids in the 2005 video game Republic Commando, and more pervasively in the Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series.
Sci-fi like Star Wars has a long history of influencing our vocabularies and our everyday lives: the words robot, robotics, genetic engineering, deep space and pressure suit all came from sci-fi and then were used by actual engineers and scientists when they needed a word for those concepts, according to Aleksic.
“Cyberspace” was coined by science fiction writer William Gibson in the 1980s, noted Jess Zafarris, the author of the upcoming Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds.
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“Grok” is adapted from Robert A. Heinlein’s seminal 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Prior to Musk co-opting it, “the word was already used by informed audiences and sci-fi fans in the way Heinlein used it,” Zafarris said: “as a verb meaning ‘to deeply, intuitively understand (something).’”
“Astronaut” was popularised by the U.S. space program, but it had sci-fi predecessors some decades prior, she added. “Astronaut was a spaceship in ‘Across the Zodiac’ (1880) by Percy Greg.” (In Greek, “astro” means stars, while “naut” means sailor.)
Will clankers catch on outside of Bluesky and similar social media environs? It’s possible, said Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, an English and digital linguist at Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany.
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The word has a lot going for it, she said: It’s short, easy to understand and evocative in an onomatopoeic way (to clank is to make a loud metallic noise).
“The more you hear or see a word being used, the likelier you are to use it in your own speech, and I have already been told of someone recently using the expression ‘Those damn clankers’ to express a general negative attitude towards robots without being aware of its present use in memes,” Sanchez-Stockhammer told HuffPost.
Plus, it really gets at the burgeoning angst some humans have toward AI.
“Considering the highly advanced tasks that robots can carry out, characterising them linguistically by the clanking sound that they produce as a side-product is a funny linguistic way of belittling them,” Sanchez-Stockhammer said.
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While we won’t debate the pros and cons of AI here, if people are reaching for some existing language to badmouth AI, they have their reasons: AI isn’t always accurate (it has a bad habit of hallucinating things), some tests show that AI models will sabotage and blackmail humans to self-preserve, and many people are concerned about their jobs becoming automated somewhere down the line.
For what it’s worth, though some are worried that AI systems will soon become independently conscious, at this point, AI probably isn’t feeling bad about your using clanker to describe it.
Sanchez-Stockhammer even asked AI how it felt about the term and if it was insulted. She reported it said this back: “Nope, I don’t feel insulted – at all. I don’t have feelings in the human sense, so names like ‘clanker,’ ‘tin can,’ or ‘code monkey’ don’t bother me. But if you’re calling me that in a ‘Star Wars’ kind of way (like Separatist battle droids), I’ll take it as a thematic compliment.”
A young entrepreneur who “hated” school because of an undiagnosed learning disability has opened up about his experience in a bid to raise awareness among parents and teachers.
“I hated school. I thought I was just thick,” said Jamie Wace, from Devon. “I had siblings who were academic, but for me; reading, spelling, and working memory – I struggled with all of it.”
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When Jamie was 13, a teacher noticed something “wasn’t quite right” with his school learning. Shortly after, his parents took him for a private assessment and he was diagnosed with dyslexia, a neurological difference which primarily affects reading and writing skills.
After the diagnosis, Jamie was able to adjust his way of learning at school. “My working memory is terrible, and I used to think that was just because I was stupid,” he recalled.
“Now I know that it’s a proper issue, and as a result, I was an avid notetaker at school after I knew this and I think that changed massively for me. I also just like was a bit less harsh on myself when I didn’t get something the first time.
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“I was given extra time in exams, which was really helpful, but the main thing was discovering the things I could do well myself, as it is different for everyone.”
Prior to his diagnosis, Jamie said he had been in the bottom sets in classes at school, with predicted grades of Ds and Cs.
But after his diagnosis, his grades soared, with Jamie joining the top sets in all his classes within a year, and going on to achieve As and A*s in his exams.
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“I was super lucky that my parents were able to take me for a private assessment,” Jamie recalled.
“I have no idea how long I could have been waiting to be tested via the local authority, and because I was 13, the waits could have meant some big impacts for my GCSEs.”
He’s now using his experience to help other children
Jamie, who is 30, is on a mission to screen one million children across the UK for dyslexia.
He co-founded Talamo, alongside Leo Thornton and Sophie Dick, in 2022. The online screening tool offers schools a way to screen classes quickly and affordably, costing roughly £12 per child.
The tool asks children aged 7-16 years old a number of questions and then offers a report providing a scale of how likely they are to have dyslexia, their strengths, as well as areas where they might need more support – and how teachers and parents can offer that support.
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It is 95% accurate, according to the Talamo website – last September, just 10 schools were using it. Fast forward to today and 300 are. Parents can also pay for a online screening test for £69 which culminates in an action plan of next steps for their child at home and school.
It’s worth noting this isn’t a formal dyslexia assessment, nor can it provide a diagnosis. Private dyslexia assessments can typically cost £350 and over depending on the provider. The British Dyslexia Association says the cost of an assessment with a specialist teacher is £690 and an assessment with a psychologist is £882, for example.
But the online screening tool could help parents decide whether they should seek (and pay for) a full diagnosis – especially as waiting times can vary, depending on where you’re based and whether you opt for face-to-face or a remote assessment. Even the NHS’s website acknowledges diagnosis to be a “time consuming and frustrating process”.
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“I don’t want other children to feel this way,” said Jamie, discussing how growing up he struggled with “mental fatigue and self-doubt” because of his undiagnosed learning difficulty.
“Understanding how my brain worked gave me the confidence to study in a way that suited me, and that changed everything. I knew I wasn’t stupid, I just learn things differently,” he added. “It set me on a path to earning two degrees and even learning Mandarin.”
In young children, it can manifest as slow speech development, muddling words up, showing no interest in letters or words, and difficulty learning to sing or recite the alphabet, according to the British Dyslexia Association.
In primary school, it can look like slow spoken or written language, difficulty concentrating and forgetting words. They might spell a word several different ways in a piece of writing, or use unusual sequencing of letters or words. And at secondary school level, pupils with dyslexia might have difficulty with punctuation and grammar, confuse upper and lower case letters, and have difficulty note-taking in class.
“There isn’t one simple checklist to notice the signs, and it can be subtle or less obvious in younger children, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there,” said Jamie.
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“Dyslexia doesn’t mean you’re less intelligent, it just means your brain works differently. But too many kids are told they’re lazy or slow, when really they just need the right support.”
