FROM PREVIOUS PAGE

It’s the story the TV brainbox kept private . . . until now: How her son battled severe learning disabilities and cruel school bullies to prove that with grit (and a mother’s love) he could excel too, with a master’s degree

TWENTY years ago, Carol Vorderman was TV’s golden girl, the highest paid woman on television. Her reputation as the brainbox on Countdown was opening up all sorts of presenting roles, including (oh, the irony) the fronting of a show called Britain’s Brainiest Kid.

Her career trajectory would continue to rise, to see her launch her own range of education books and even become a Government education adviser. ‘I could teach. I can teach. I know about the theory of teaching,’ she points out. ‘I’m good at teaching.’

not at home, she wasn’t. Yes, she had excelled at helping her first child, Katie, through the basics. Like Carol, Katie was a natural. Katie’s path — all the way to the same university which Carol had attended, Cambridge — was set.

Katie is now 29 and about to be awarded her PhD in nanotechnology, has worked for nASA and wants to be an astronaut. Then there was Cameron, five years Katie’s junior. When he was about three, they sat down ‘at our kitchen table, all lovely’, to tackle the ABCs. The experience was not remotely enjoyable. Or successful, his mother admits.

‘We’d attempt very basic things. I’d take the letter e phonetically and say, “Right Cameron, how do we say e? eh, eh, eh, eh, eh”, and he’d repeat, “eh, eh, eh”. We’d do that over and over, and then within seconds I’d show him the letter e again and he’d say “mmm” or “dah”, or anything really. We’d do eh-eh-eh a hundred times and he’d say “blugh”. It just wasn’t going in. I remember thinking, “something’s seriously wrong here”.’

There were other issues too. Cameron’s ability to concentrate was non-existent. Carol noticed that the longer she spent trying to get him to focus, the more likely he would be to ‘just conk out, literally. His head would hit the table. Flat out’. He could speak, but he’d been a late developer. ‘We didn’t know then because no one talks about it, but that’s a sign of special educational needs.’

He hadn’t managed entire sentences until he was well over three. Don’t panic, Carol thought. He was a happy, affectionate child. He was about to start nursery where everything would fall into place. not so.

‘even before he’d turned five, the same things I’d seen were being repeated in the classroom, with catastrophic consequences. He was being put out of class for being disruptive and causing trouble. At four! I couldn’t believe it. My sweet, wonderful little boy.’ It was the start of every parent’s nightmare. The following year, the headteacher at Cameron’s first prep school summoned Carol and said he could not continue.

‘He said Cam was getting into little fights, was disruptive, a troublemaker, basically. I took him around other schools — six, maybe seven — to see if they would take him, but when they heard the history, they all said no. He was deemed unteachable.’

By this time Carol was divorced from Paddy King, the children’s father, and ‘in this utter nightmare, I’d never felt so powerless’.

‘By six, this child I loved so much, that I would have done anything for, was being rejected — by the school, by the teachers, by the other pupils. It was heart-breaking, utterly heart-breaking.

‘And I was lost. Was I going to have to teach him at home, myself? How? I just wasn’t equipped. I didn’t know how to teach a child with this level of special needs.’

Cameron is listening quietly as his mother describes all this. At 24, her little boy, all 6ft 5in of him, now towers over her. This week, when Cameron was awarded a master’s degree from Dundee University, Carol was quick to congratulate him on social media, as she had done with Katie’s triumphs.

This was different though, and she made an emotional reference to Cameron’s learning difficulties — difficulties they all feared would hold him back in life.

‘That we are here, with him gaining a master’s is down to Cameron, and his determination,’ she says. ‘I could not be prouder of how he has done this, because frankly I didn’t know how it would be possible.

‘The gap between how I thought children learned and how he needed to learn was so vast.

‘But he has been teaching me. I’m still learning from him. There’s so much about education, about the brain, about how we learn that I simply did not know. Things that we, as a society, need to know.’

S He gets a bit emotional. Little wonder. ‘I knew he wasn’t thick, or slow, or any of those things that he and children like him are often told. I always thought he was brilliantly bright. He is.’

Cameron smiles, but questions that brilliance. ‘Oh, I still think I’m an idiot, but I would now question how we define intelligence. Mum downplays her role, but I wouldn’t be here without her. She wouldn’t give up on me,’ he says.

Many hearing that Cameron has reached these academic heights with learning disabilities may well question how severe those disabilities can be.

I question it myself. There are parts of this interview where he sounds like a university professor — eloquent, erudite, using sentence structure that no one with learning ‘issues’ would use. Surely?

Yet there are other moments when it becomes clear that this is not a ‘normal’ conversation. He’s very formal when explaining things.

There are moments, particularly deep into an ice-cold clear explanation, where he sounds almost automated, but he explains himself that he is concentrating hard. He doesn’t shy from directness. ‘Oh, I am disabled, and yes I do use the word. I have a learning disability. It hasn’t gone away. If I’m talking to my family or friends I know very well, I will actually stutter and pause more, as everyone does. But I’m making an effort not to do that today because I’m concentrating.’

He tells me that he’s only able to do this interview because he has been on medication since he was seven years old.

The pills he still calls ‘concentration tablets’ (‘mum would always say “have you taken your concentration tablet?”’) are called Concerta, a slow-release form of Ritalin. ‘For us, they were a miracle drug,’ Carol says. ‘I could see the difference in Cam within an hour of taking them. He could focus, stay awake. Something happened in his brain.’

H OW severe were — or more accurately, are — Cameron’s issues? Carol draws a Venn diagram in the air to illustrate. ‘There are overlapping circles, with severe dyslexia and dyspraxia, ADHD, ADD and autism.’ She stabs the centre. ‘Cam has severe dyslexia, ADD and ADHD. When he was six I got him into a school called Fairley House, which at the time was one of only two in the country dealing with children with the worst learning difficulties of this type.

‘They only took children who had most of these issues, and Cam did, although they wouldn’t do a formal diagnosis until he was seven.

‘Thank God he got in. I honestly don’t know what we would have done. I remember he had to have three days of tests to assess whether he was “bad” enough to get in. I was in this terrible place of hoping that he’d do as badly in the tests as possible. I was saying, “please God don’t start reading now, Cam”.’

Fairley House, in London’s Pimlico, is a private school, though. Fees are a staggering £11,000 a term. Out of reach to most, then?

‘This is a huge problem,’ says Carol. ‘This week I’ve had hundreds of parents contact me, in exactly the situation we were, with kids who are being thrown on the scrapheap. It’s scandalous. I could afford this. Most cannot.’

Carol would never describe herself as a Tiger Mum, but it’s clear she fought tooth and nail for Cameron.

We talk about what it means when children are deemed disruptive. ‘With me, I didn’t get rowdy. It was quite different,’ he says.

He embarks on a lengthy but illuminating explanation of what would happen in his head when under pressure. ‘The teacher would go round the class asking “2+2?”. Someone would say “4”. Then “3+4”? The next person would say “7”. Then he’d come to me, “Cameron, 1+2? Cameron? Cameron??”. I’d say “um, oh, um, 4”.

‘What was happening in my head was utter panic. I’d feel I had to answer in time, to keep the rhythm the other children had set, but I was so busy thinking of this that I couldn’t remember what the question was. I’d be panicking.

‘Sometimes I’d be asked, for instance, 2+2, and I’d say, “What if it’s 2+3?” And the teacher would sigh and say, “It’s 2+2. Concentrate”. At that age, you think what is in your head is normal. You don’t realise you are wired differently.’ He is still wired differently, but has adopted ‘strategies’ to cope.

He explains he can read ‘but probably not like you can read. I still don’t see whole sentences, or even words. I see individual letters. I have to guess the meaning a lot of

the time.’ He uses crib sheets and lists. when it comes to complex academic work, he tries to ‘dumb everything down so I can make it become clear in my head’.

Frankly, it sounds exhausting being Cameron. And what a precarious path they have walked. even with Carol’s determination and deep pockets, his experience of formal education can best be described as mixed.

At Fairley House he made huge progress, mostly because of very small classes and a lot of one-toone work. when Cameron was ten the family moved from London to Bristol, however. Carol says that ideally they would have moved sooner ‘because I’m not a London person’, but she was terrified about Cameron’s future. Perhaps she was right to be. The first secondary school (still private, and hugely expensive) he attended in Bristol was not a happy experience.

This school, ‘a big Hogwarts’, had a specialist unit for dyslexic pupils. Things were fine to begin with, but as Cameron moved into his teenage years, things deteriorated. ‘It wasn’t the teachers — the teaching was fine — it was the pupils,’ he says. The bullying started. ‘I was very tall even then, and not strong, so that would be an issue when it came to fights, which there were a lot of. I would never be punched in the head or anything but there were fights, scuffles. The part I found difficult, though, was the psychological bullying, the stuff teachers can’t do anything about.’

He would be picked on, made to feel ‘slow, stupid, different’. ‘One boy would do this thing where he’d say, “Hi Cameron, hi Cameron, hi Cameron”, over and over while talking to someone else. what was I supposed to do, tell a teacher: “He’s saying ‘Hi Cameron’ in an irritating way”? But bullies are devious. They know this.’

By 14, he had entered ‘the most unhappy period of my life’, he says. ‘every day at school was either awful, or crappy, or really crappy. It never went above neutral.’

AGAIN, it broke his

mother’s heart. ‘To see your child go from a happy kid to a withdrawn one is the worst thing possible,’ Carol admits. she was livid. ‘Forty per cent of young offenders have some sort of dyslexia, or ADHD, and I thought the school wasn’t doing enough to sort out the issues.

‘I had a set-to with the deputy head teacher. I was pretty aggressive for me (I hate arguments), but they were not doing enough.’

Things improved, for a while. and Cameron clung on. He got seven GCses and then moved to Clifton High school to do his A-levels.

By this time, his sister’s academic

brilliance was being written about in the press, though.

Did this not cause huge conflict? ‘In a funny way, she was so high-achieving that she was in another league, so it wasn’t an issue,’ says Cameron. ‘Her achievements —working for NASA, working on a cure for cancer — sound comedic, the sort of thing you’d make up to exaggerate how brilliant someone is.’

Carol felt desperate simply for Cameron to finish school ‘with some exams’. He says that by 16, he understood his own condition more and drew up a meticulous plan to ‘reinvent’ himself.

‘I did the “fake it til you make it” thing. Going into a new school in the sixth form, I was going to be a confident person, and not allow myself to panic, not as much anyway. I tried to identify the things that made me stand out, that made the others target me.’

At school, his own talents were emerging. He showed flair in computer studies.

At home he was an avid gamer, not just playing the games but studying them, looking at how they were designed, trying out his own theories. ‘I didn’t have issues concentrating when gaming, for some reason.’

Cameron didn’t do well in his A-levels but did get into South Gloucestershire College to study for a two-year diploma in animation. And that’s where he found his ‘thing’. He achieved a distinction. With that grade he could apply to university. ‘He just went the long way round,’ says Carol. He got in at the University of West of England in Bristol to study animation and last summer achieved a firstclass honours degree, the first in the family.

From there he’s taken a year at the University of Dundee to gain his master’s degree in animation and VFX, hopefully to secure his route into the video gaming industry, where he is now determined to excel.

‘And he will,’ says Carol. ‘I have absolutely no doubt about that. Cameron will do whatever he sets his mind to do.’

It has been such a long and emotional road, but are there lessons to be learned from Cameron’s journey? Huge ones, says Carol. ‘Cameron made a short video this week to say thank you for all the kind messages and a message to people in his position. I put it out on social media and he took it by storm.

‘Thousands of people said what an absolute inspiration he is, and he is, he’s the most happy person I know. Nothing ruffles him, he’s kind and honest and hard-working and confident and humble and just wonderful.

‘There are so many Camerons out there. They are the ones I worry about now, and want to help, if I can. No child should be told they are unteachable, because they are not.’