One of the most important goals of school is to teach children how to read and write. But there are also children with great problems in reading and writing/dyslexia at school. In the Swedish School Plan you can, for example, read that one of the school’s most important goals is to give these children with special needs the help that they need.

This study will investigate how six young people with reading and writing problems/dyslexia experienced the first nine years at school. There has been very little research regarding students´ experiences of having reading and writing problems/dyslexia early in school, which is strange because school is a place where children spend most of their time. This study will raise the questions about how young people were treated by their teachers, what they think of having a diagnosis, what kind of individualization they received and how they think about continuing their education. To fulfil the study’s purpose I did six qualitative interviews with young people between the ages of 18 and 24 years. The primary theoretical basis in this study was identity formation, inclusion, exclusion and integration. The results show, for example, that five out of the six young people sometimes experienced that their teachers didn’t understand their writing and reading problems and that resulted in inappropriate treatment from the teachers. The young people could feel anxiety which often led to low self-confidence. The diagnosis was difficult for three of them, but none of the interviewed felt that the diagnosis had affected them. The results also show that a good individualization was difficult for the teachers to accomplish in practice, and it also showed that previous experiences in school perhaps influenced whether they chose to continue their studies or not. One of the conclusions is that it is very important to discover a child’s reading and writing problem at an early age and to give the child a lot of help. Otherwise the child can develop a low self-esteem, and it is negative for a child’s identity formation.