Last summer I attended "The Cost of English Spelling", a conference organised by The Simple Spelling Society. I have just received the Conference Proceedings in booklet form.
Marsha Bell's englishspellingproblems.co.uk is a very useful website for anybody grappling with the complexities of my language, from native students who struggle with spelling to people learning English as a foreign language.
What I  hope it will show you is that sometimes the disabling factor is inherant in the environment, and not merely a disability that lies within your own or your student's 'psyche' or intelligence.

We hear a lot now about disabling environments. We hear about making all public areas accessible to wheelchair users. We hear much less about modifying the environmental barriers for those who struggle with learning to read and write.
Surely that is the greatest disability of all in our fast moving, knowledge based, communications driven society?

The Simple Spelling Society www.spellingsociety.org has been attempting to remove those barriers to literacy since 1908.
Currently the English language  relies on random letters representing random sounds in thousands of common words.For students with working memory problems, or with visual memory problems, or with sound discrimination problems, this random use of letters is a barrier to their learning. Usually the barrier is in place from the infant school.

Could we not also just begin to take a more systematic approach to spelling? Could we begin to modify the environment and remove barriers to disability that lock so many of our children into feelings of failure; feelings that cost them dear throughout their literate life?