Abuse, neglect of a two teenagers with visual needs, or dyslexic?

A couple of days ago, I worked with two teenagers who had dropped out (been dropped out) of the education system but were being pulled back in by a forward looking FE college.

Both young people had simple visual problems which had been overlooked although that is a simplification.

One, the guy, had the following problems. 

•  One eye being short sighted with an astigmastism,and the other normal.
• leading to very easy distraction

• A need to turn his head sideways to look at you without severe discomfort in his left eye.( it turned.)
• because of the uncorrected focussing problem.

• Because of this people thinking that he was not looking at them when he was spoken to.
• The ' Look at me when I am talking to you!'
• Do not look out of the window boy  

'syndromes'

In addition 

• he needed a large font to read effectively..  font 24.

• He was light sensitive. Bright lighting was creating reading and visual problems..possibly his pupils were not closing up enough, or it could have been a low level of melanin in the back of his eyes.

• He needed a specific colour background to read effectively.

Now all of this is correctible. By the time the session was over he was actually reading quite well and comfortably for the first time in his life.

Over 12 years late!

He has been effectively abused by a blinkered education system,  that assumed too much, which labelled him.

Oh by the way he had been labelled as dyslexic.  Did not help him though.

We discussed what he might become now. He must have been wondering how it had taken so long to get to this point.

I was left wondering about the millions of people in the UK who had solvable problems, whose lives had been limited.