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Words, Not Walls

Lennie Varvarides

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The Museum of the Neurodivergent Aesthetic — MONDA

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8 min read

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Apr 16, 2021

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DYSPLA Founder, Lennie Varvarides speaks on why poetry is urgently needed in areas of high deprivation

Before you begin reading this post, let me say that I am not an Education Specialist — but I am an expert on how society and schools fail people with Learning Differences through the work I do at DYSPLA. I identify as Working Class and my 7-year-old child attends a school in an area of high deprivation. My Cypriot parents’ childhood, was also one of ‘absolute poverty’, so these themes are extremely important to me.

Charles Dickens’ much-loved novels illustrate a Victorian world where poverty and poor literacy go hand in hand, and for many, not enough has changed in the last 120 years. Victorian England will still look familiar in 2022, with child poverty predicted to rise to 5.2 million hungry children in the United Kingdom. These figures were reported by the UK Government’s Social Mobility Commission.