SPELD NSW Inc

16 September 2019 UCF Comments Off

Assist with Responsive Website Costs
SPELD NSW provides support to children and adults with specific learning difficulties (like dyslexia) and who struggle to learn to read, spell, write and learn mathematics across NSW. As part of that, they support their families, teachers, tutors and schools.

SPELD NSW provide a free parent information and referral service, offer professional develop for teachers, provide information, support and resources for families, teachers and schools and offer psychological assessment of specific learning difficulties.

SPELD NSW applied to UCF for a grant to assist them to build a new mobile responsive website will help to amplify their impact and support children with learning difficulties who are at risk of school failure. Their current website is very dated, not sufficiently user friendly and has frequent technological issues.

Between 5% and 10% of our population has dyslexia (a specific learning difficulty with reading) and when individuals with learning difficulties in spelling, written expression and maths, along with ADHD or issues with attention are included, around 15-20% of the students in our schools are affected.

One of the most important roles that SPELD NSW plays is to provide information and advice to parents and teachers who are supporting students with learning difficulties and with literacy and numeracy difficulties. Their website is often the first place that parents and teachers access to find information about how to support their children and students. Having a clear, helpful and user friendly website would allow them to provide better support and information to parents, teachers and schools across NSW.

In addition, the website would provide a portal through which parents can seek personalised advice from the free Information and Referral Service, a much needed service which is funded by the NSW Department of Education.

SPELD NSW tracks the numbers of parents that contact the Information and Referral Service and the number of individuals that use their website. Their goal is to get at least 100 queries requesting information and support through the website in the first year and an increase in at least 5% in the traffic going to the website. Through this increased engagement, they will be able to provide support to more families, teachers and schools across NSW.

While website development costs are not something we usually fund, UCF directors decided to award a grant of $2,000 to SPELD NSW in this case because of the excellent “reach” they already have to the population they serve. We look forward to the increased statistics in their Grant Aquittal.