Disleksia lures KO! Once again dyslexia has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Professor Julian Elliott, an educational psychologist at Durham University, tells us that dyslexia is no more than a handy fig-leaf for pushy middle-class parents too embarrassed to admit that wee Jimmy is a numpty. The implication is that it is also a handy label for a multi-million-pound dyslexia industry, staffed by specialists and academics with a vested interest in slapping it on more and more hapless bairns found crying into their readers. The prof last popped up two years ago in a Channel 4 Dispatches programme called The Dyslexia Myth in which he described the condition as "an emotional construct". Hate mail followed.

Yet Elliott, too, is open to charges of self-interest, having bolstered his own career on the back of what many regard as the equivalent of a "flat earth" position. He is widely regarded as the equivalent of Exxon Mobil chief executive Lee Raymond on climate change, or Dr Andrew Wakefield on the link between MMR and autism.

As someone who managed to take almost 12 years to crack the intellectually relatively simple knack of extracting meaning from print in the days before dyslexia was recognised as an educational issue, I have to confess to mixed feelings about Elliott's work. I still bear the scars of various primary school humiliations. Among them is the day when my nine-year-old self laboriously decoded an A A Milne eight-line poem and committed it to memory for the purpose of a class reading exercise. Clever clogs Julie Hunt spouted half of The Ancient Mariner, or some such feat. The teacher asked us both to stand up. While Julie was preening herself, Mrs Ashton pointed at me, saying: "Look class. This is a lazy girl."

I was one of the lucky ones. In my early teens something clicked and though my silent reading is still no faster than reading aloud, I managed well enough to get a degree and a job. My red face at primary school was as nothing compared with the torture - that's the only word to describe it - suffered by the "backward" child who went on to become the finest racing driver in the world, Jackie Stewart. This man, who after 30 years can still remember the curve on every corner of every racing circuit he competed on, cannot to this day recite the alphabet. At school in Dumbarton he was branded "a real dud - stupid, dumb and thick". As he put it:"When you are a young person and you are put in that position, you suffer. It's like banging your head against a brick wall."

Children's author Teresa Breslin is a former librarian who admits she used to be "sniffy about bad spelling" until she encountered a creative little girl who, when asked to write the sentence "the babies jumped on the bed", laboured and sweated to come up with "the dadies jumbed on the deb". Breslin realised that b, d, p and q are basically the same shape in four orientations. This child was seeing letters differently to her classmates. The outcome was that Teresa went on to write Whispers in the Graveyard which won her the Rolls-Royce of children's literature prizes, the Carnegie Medal. Writing in first person and present tense, she uses the book to look through the eyes of a young boy who wonders why he can't decipher print or make his thoughts sit as words on paper. At one point he says: "All my images and ideas are crushed and stillborn. Rainbows arc inside me, then abort, earthbound, into monochrome dullness."

Better than any manual or website, this book captures the frustration and anger in a bright child with dyslexia. The official definition goes something like this: a range of types of learning difficulty where someone of normal intelligence has persistent and significant problems with reading, writing and spelling. It is thought to be a congenital and developmental condition affecting the brain. Dyslexia is simply Greek for "difficulty with words".

This brings us back to Julian Elliott. Elliott is no ivory tower academic. Before he joined the staff at Durham, he worked for more than three decades as an educational psychologist, dealing with thousands of children with reading difficulties. I doubt if he would deny that any of the children described above had a problem with reading that needed to be addressed. He would also agree that some children who struggle with reading, writing and spelling have normal, or even above-average, intelligence. In this respect, all those "Dyslexia doesn't exist, says academic" headlines are misleading. What he actually said was that the label is now applied so widely that it has become meaningless. Here he may have a point. Not for one moment would I want to turn the clock back to the bad old days when Jackie Stewart was being ritually abused at school.

The educational experience for the 4% or so of the population who, like him, can be classed as "severely dyslexic" has been infinitely improved. With extra time allowed in exams, help with course work and, in some cases, the provision of scribes or specialised computer programs, an increasing number are going on to higher education. This is part and parcel of widening access and it should be celebrated.

However, one can't help wondering what is going wrong in a society that purports to be meritocratic and yet exhibits less social mobility than the 1950s. A factor in this is undoubtedly the expertise of the middle class in exploiting what the state has to offer. That is what lies behind the present row about the Tories and English grammar schools. In Scotland, the same syndrome manifests itself in arguments about catchment areas and placement requests. Elliott's specific concern is that it is these same middle-class parents who are pressing for their little darlings to be labelled as dyslexic when the symptoms are far from clear-cut, and that this results in their children gaining access to more than their fair share of attention and resources. Teachers confirm this anecdotally. As one retired head told me yesterday: "Parents in poorer areas retain a traditional, rather deferential, attitude towards teachers and some staff still take the view What can you expect in Cranhill or wherever?', when the children don't read." Concerned well-heeled parents have found willing accomplices in the burgeoning psychological services departments that have expanded in direct proportion to the medicalisation of conditions such as dyslexia. Elliott's concern is that some of those jumping on the dyslexia bandwagon aren't little Einsteins held back by a clinically-defined medical condition but simply slow learners or late developers. The corollary must be that some children from deprived backgrounds aren't getting the help they need.

Perhaps this leads us back to the old conker of class sizes. Perhaps, regardless of IQ, every struggling reader, dyslexic or not, needs focused and directed tuition. That is simply not possible in a class of 33. Meanwhile, the latest figures show that more than 10,000 pupils a year in Scotland now qualify for "special arrangements" for exams, including extra time, because of conditions such as dyslexia, and almost 6000 "declared dyslexics" now qualify for special support at Scottish universities. Are some of them milking the system to compensate for an inability to meet set standards?

I'm lost for words.