HWDA 2026 Annual General Meeting

This year’s AGM celebrated our 50th Golden Anniversary and we were delighted to welcome Alice Hubbard and Bertie Ballinger as our very special guest speakers.

Alice was one of the early founders of HWDA in the late 1970s and gave a talk on the origins and history of our association.

Bertie has raised money for our charity through sponsored cycle rides and shared his family’s story on how dyslexia has impacted them – a story that will be very familiar to our families too.

There was a slideshow of some of the wonderful things HWDA has been up to since the last HWDA – a small snapshot of the work, fundraising and networking we do alongside the fun and learning! Click on the link to see the slideshow.

Linda Adey, Bromsgrove’s Senior Tutor, gave a moving tribute to Grace Shepherd who sadly died on April 1st this year. Grace, pictured with her family, (second from left) had been the Parent Rep and a stalwart of Bromsgrove Workshop for many years. This is Linda’s tribute:

There is a lot I don’t know about Grace, when she was born, a middle name. But what I do know has made me want to stand here today to celebrate the part of her life I did know about. 

Grace was a wonderful woman who was always at her husband John’s side. She would do anything to support her two sons who were severely dyslexic. Indeed, it was an anecdote about her eldest son that I included in my many talks about dyslexia (of course with Grace’s permission) – the clever boy, who at the age of nine, couldn’t spell his own name … and his name was Tim. This would always make the audience gasp, but I would always conclude that both he and his younger brother Will went to Loughborough university and gained first class honours degrees in Civil engineering. 

Grace was so very proud. 

I hope that as an adult Tim would take pleasure from knowing that those few words gave hope to thousands of families over the decades. 

I remember well when Will came back to the Workshop to give an inspiring talk to our study skills groups about Life After School, where (amongst other things) he remembered strategies he had learned at the workshop which had been so helpful. 

They say that a friend comes into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime! The first two describe my friendship with Grace. 

I think I first met Grace in 1990 across a table at an HWDA committee meeting. I do not recall her having a specific role on the Committee but she was proactive, full of ideas and always offering her time. She stayed on the committee long after her boys had left the Workshop and, even when she did retire from the committee, she would always support our special events and fundraisers.

Grace was my mentor.  In those early days, I was like many of you, a young mum with a dyslexic son. I was so worried.

I had just become Senior Tutor at our Bromsgrove Workshop. Grace’s boys were a few years older than mine so whenever I reached a hurdle, Grace had already mastered it and was happy to share her knowledge. This is something I have always tried to emulate. When talking to parents I remember well my search for someone with knowledge and a sympathetic ear. I would like to think that I have followed in Grace’s footsteps in this respect. 

I wish I could say that I had been Grace’s friend for a lifetime but our paths parted and life got in the way, but we continued to exchange Christmas cards and hers would always contain some encouraging words about my continued life with dyslexia. 

I was very sad to hear of Grace’s passing but not at all surprised that, even at the end, she remembered us by asking for donations for HWDA. 

Thank you Grace, and Rest in Peace. 

Linda has also paid tribute to Grace McQuaid, another key contributor to the development of the HWDA. Grace died last year but her legacy will live on in all she achieved.

This is Linda’s tribute:

Sadly, a very great lady in the world of dyslexia died last year. 

It is over a hundred years since the word dyslexia was coined to describe the difficulties experienced by those people who struggle with literacy. But still, in the early 1970s, there was no mention of it when I trained as a teacher. 

In 1976, a group of concerned professionals and parents formed the Hereford and Worcester Dyslexia Association to raise awareness, stand up to conventional thinking and improve the lot of dyslexics. 

Grace McQuaid was there. 

In her classroom she pioneered new strategies like Words in Colour, but realised that not all dyslexics were helped by the same methods. She came to understand that dyslexics were all different and needed different strategies to help them thrive. 

She also realised that there was no framework for training teachers how to teach these vulnerable children. And what’s more there seemed to be no one even looking at how this could be achieved!

So, encouraged by fellow HWDA committee member, Victor Booth who worked for Worcestershire LEA, Grace spent five years of her life putting together a training course for teachers, which became the RSA Diploma course for teachers of SpLD. 

In 1985 there were three pilot centres at Evesham, Harrow and Watford – the first courses of their kind in the UK, the gold standard. Over the decades, thousands of teachers (myself included) will have gone on to support hundreds of thousands of dyslexics, giving them  the chance of a better future. They all owe such a lot to Grace McQuaid. 

One of Grace’s students, Margaret Newton, went on to devise the Aston Portfolio and the Aston Index, a tool for teachers to assess their dyslexic pupils. Margaret too was instrumental in the growth and success of the young HWDA. 

Another of her students was Keith Holland. He founded the UK’s first in-house visual therapy clinic in Cheltenham, and also  the British Association of Behavioural Optometrists. He attended Grace’s course so that he would understand dyslexia and the children he was aiming to help.

Peter Blythe, who founded the Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology (INPP) in Chester in 1975, which assessed the links between early movement, primitive reflexes, and learning difficulties, also worked with Grace in Worcester forming assessment and support materials. 

As an Association, we will always be eternally grateful to Grace and her fellow pioneers who, only half a century ago, battled against convention to get some kind of justice for dyslexics. 

Grace’s legacy was phenomenal. 

Thank you to Ian, Grace’s son, and Frances, Grace’s friend and HWDA tutor, for filling in the gaps. 

Gallery of pictures from the AGM