This is a question that we are often asked. For instance:
Dear Specialist Assessor,
We are interested in a dyslexia assessment with you for our daughter who is 7 years old. We suspect she may have dyslexia. We have been told by her SENCo to wait until she is 8 however she fits the description of dyslexia and we don’t want to wait.
My reply:
Dear Parents,
The reason dyslexia is generally identified from 8 years old, is that there is some evidence that some children are not ready to learn to read until they are 7 years old. If that is the case, then at 8 years old we can be confident that most children have been learning to read when they are certainly ready to do so, both in and out of school, for at least a year by the time they are 8 years old.
In some cases, a 7 year old child has had much specialist literacy intervention using multisensory methods (for example they have been seeing a specialist literacy tutor outside of school). Their difficulties taking on new literacy learning are clear, and the literacy tutor notes that the child’s literacy difficulties are resistant to intervention. If this is the case, and the child has had at least 6 months of weekly specialist intervention on top of schooling and support at home, then if their profile fits with a diagnosis of dyslexia on assessment, this can be diagnosed from 7 years old. However, it is more often the case that the child has not yet accessed specialist support; if this is the case, then at 7 years old the recommendation would be to do so for a period of time before assessment. Then, when the child is 8, they can come for assessment with good evidence that they have done extra work to try to improve their literacy skills, and despite this, they are still struggling.
A specialist tutor can be found on the PATOSS and BDA websites; they contain a directory and you can search based on your location.