This Neurodiversity Celebration week we’re sharing this blog by Jacques Holmes, a student who has dyslexia who was on our law conversion programme, the Graduate Foundation in Law. In this blog he will be sharing his experiences with the course whilst sharing his tips for how to juggle studying law with dyslexia.

So, how did you find studying the GFL?*

I really enjoyed the course and the studying in general, in terms of the course material, the teaching and the independent study – I thought it was all really good to be honest. 

While studying at The College of Legal Practice multiple features of my course helped me to learn and study with dyslexia. The reading that comes with the course inevitably takes more time however, summaries in the textbook, the podcasts provided in each module as well as the occasional diagram greatly helped me. 

What are your tips for other students studying with the College who have dyslexia? 

1. I like the fact that you got a physical textbook sent to you as well as the online resources, I found it really helped to use them as I didn’t have to keep flipping back between the tabs when writing which is something I recommend utilising for your studies. 
2. I would recommend the use of flashcard to learn legal terms as I found them effective and can be used in multiple different ways.
3. I found the podcasts provided in each module really helpful in my production of concise notes as the podcasts have the transcripts available and you can easily go back to that specific segment and read that transcript whilst listening to the podcast and listen to it as many times as you need. 
4. One thing I found that really helped me from an accessibility standpoint were the summaries at the end of each chapter in the textbook. That helps me out a lot because when I take notes, I struggle with condensing it down to a note. So I normally end up kind of almost writing down the entire textbook, like word for word in my notes so this really helped me not just condense it but also identify the key points that are important to note down. 
5. I found it useful to utilise the exemplars given after each lecture, which were really good, and then looked at how they were filled out to sort of create my own template to work with. 
6. Take your time, and find the right approach that works for you. For me, I find reading through the content without taking any notes or highlighting sections just so I can fully understand it works for me, and then after that I go through the content a second time, this time to take notes then reread closer to assessment time. 

My dyslexia can sometimes increase the amount of time I have to study especially with concepts that are novel to me. However, I always found The College of Legal Practice, their lecturers and support team are always happy to help with any queries I had or support I needed.

* The GFL programme was the College's law conversion course that ran from 2022-2023 (now replaced by the GDL).