Dyslexia Awareness Week: My Story by Luke Hearne-Brown

Imogen BarberOctober 7, 2024

The theme for Dyslexia Awareness Week 2024 is “What’s Your Story?” We caught up with Luke Hearne-Brown to hear more about his experience of dyslexia.

Luke is a successful young filmmaker and co-founder of Imprint Films. He has worked on projects for clients including Running Bear and British Boarding Schools and is currently collaborating on a project with the Director behind Netflix’s drama, Top Boy.

Luke was diagnosed with dyslexia when he was in Year 3. His experience of primary school was not particularly positive until he started receiving specialist help from an external tutor who was trained using the Dyslexia Action Literacy Programme – DALP. Luke took the time to share his story with us and what motivated him to persevere with A-Levels and a degree in filmmaking, when at one point he’d fallen very much out of love with education.

“Burden on my childhood”

One of the things Luke remembers most about primary school was the lack of understanding from adults about why he was acting out which earned him the label of “the bad kid.” This left him with the feeling that mainstream schooling was simply not made for him. Luke told me that his dyslexia had quite a big impact on his family life, from struggles with homework to after-school meetings about behaviour.

Lessons too were problematic and he often relied on using his people skills to charm his way out of having to do tasks that heavily relied on reading and writing. Luke talks more about this in the video above.

Magic and wizardry – the impact of specialist tutor support

Around Year 5, when things were particularly challenging, Luke received specialist support from a tutor. He spoke to me about the huge impact this had on his literacy level and how a series of books about wizards opened the gateway to reading.

From a shy little boy to taking centre stage – going to Frewen College

On the advice of his tutor, Luke made the transition to the prep school at Frewen College, a specialist school for dyslexia. It was another anxious time for his parents as they waited for news about EHCP funding which was needed to help fund his place. Luke says the impact on his self-esteem was transformative however.

“I went from being a really quiet little boy who just didn’t want to speak to anyone, didn’t have any confidence, wasn’t sure about who he was, to taking the lead role in a stage show.”

Some hard truths, starting creative writing and the teachers who encouraged him to go further

Going to Frewen helped develop his confidence and Luke made further leaps in reading and writing, but the journey was not always straightforward. Luke went through periods of not being enamoured with education and defaulted to some of his previous avoidance behaviour. This culminated one day in a tough conversation with some home truths delivered by his mum.

After this Luke made a career plan. He had an early talent for making stop-motion graphics with Lego and later making short films with friends. Watching a Youtube video produced by a student studying TV and radio production at the University of Salford made him realise this was the industry for him.

“I love taking pictures. I love filming things. I used to do YouTube videos and make films with my friends, at the time it was all very sweet and I never thought it would lead to much. But I made a conscious decision that day. I said, well, that’s what I want do for the rest of my life.”

In order to qualify for the course, however, he would need to do A-Levels and get a Level 4 in his English GCSE. This was not going to be easy, but he had a particular English teacher at Frewen who had a few tricks of his own up his sleeve.

“He’d let me go off on these tangents. I thought I was distracting the class, but then I’d end up writing an entire piece of work about the rubbish we’d spoken about for 40 minutes. It was like a cat and mouse game and I respected him. He encouraged me to write about things I was actually interested in. Engaging with English and creative writing was almost like healing a younger version of myself. We used to just write things and he would keep pushing me to improve, improve.”

Luke vividly recalls this pivotal conversation with his mum, how he mapped out his career pathway and what made him engage with English in the video below:

Luke’s advice for young people with dyslexia

People experience dyslexia differently but Luke had this one core piece of advice to other young people who might be in a similar situation to him;

“Find the thing that you want to do because then you can excel at it. All of the avoidance behaviours come about because you are being shown up as incapable of doing something in a specific realm. But really, at the end of the day, you know, dyslexics are very clever people. They think very differently to mainstream people.”

He also emphasised the importance of having someone to champion your corner who you can open up to and help you find break-down goals together.

“The biggest thing is just understanding a pathway – it’s really daunting to work out where you’re going and to understand how to get there. But to have someone break it down for you – that’s really helpful.

You spend a lot of time masking when you have dyslexia so to have an adult you can drop the mask with – a person who knows you are covering up because you can’t do it – that’s a game changer.”

My dyslexia today – taking stock of the positives

Luke told me he still has some struggles with writing. “Sometimes I still can’t get words on paper. I can read them perfectly, but I cannot get them on the paper.” He finds tools like ChatGTP handy to help with the spelling and tone of his emails.

On the flip side, Luke told me about how useful his people skills are in his career and how growing up with dyslexia has made him resilient and empathetic. The ability to read body language, as well as being able to connect with his clients and get inside their heads has benefited him hugely.

“I think having those skills of working out what people are going to want before they want it, that’s especially useful in my industry.”

These skills were partly developed out of necessity – as a young child growing up with dyslexia you have to get a good read on people to quickly figure out who you can trust, he told me. Potentially there’s an element of pleasing people before they present you with requests or tasks in a format that’s difficult for you to access. But perhaps, Luke reflects, these skills may also be an unexpected benefit of having a brain that’s just wired a little differently.