“Every year, thousands of children enter school with undetected literacy needs. Under today’s system, it can take up to five years for a child to receive a diagnosis of dyslexia. By then, they have already struggled, disengaged, and fallen behind,” says Joe Fernandez, founder of Early Intervention Tools, which has created a screening method that picks up signs of early literacy problems in four- to six-year-olds.

Fernandez says no teacher wants a child to struggle, but the logistics of the current dyslexia screening process – which is individual, manual and takes around 40 minutes per child – pose real challenges for schools.

Parents can opt to have a child assessed privately, and an estimated 80 per cent of diagnoses are made this way. However, it costs around €900, which puts it beyond the reach of many families.

“We are ending the ‘wait to fail’ model in education and solving the early literacy problem by making risk visible earlier, action more timely and support more equitable,” says Fernandez, who understands what it’s like to find education difficult because his own dyslexia went undiagnosed.

That said, he did not let it stand in his way and has spent the past 20 years in education, publishing and digital innovation with previous start-up experience, a stint as commercial manager for digital solutions with educational resources company Folens, and five years as a senior industry adviser in edtech and publishing with the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.

Early Intervention Tools was established in mid-2023. The company is a Trinity College spin-out and came into being because the university wanted to see if the results of a research project carried out jointly with the Marino Institute of Education and Learnovate (the learning research innovation centre), had commercial potential.

The project had produced some IP which Fernandez licensed, and the company then embarked on a development phase to build out and scale its technology stack.

A group of schools signed up for an initial pilot and, having seen how the system could transform assessments that had taken days into hours, they quickly converted to paying customers.

Since then, sign-ups have gathered momentum largely by word of mouth and through webinars.

[ Dyslexia at second level: We need to do more to support studentsOpens in new window ]

“Teachers had chosen not to engage with the assessment process not because they didn’t want to, but because they didn’t have the bandwidth. It quickly became apparent that we had cracked the problem without adding to the teacher workload,” Fernandez says.

“The research had exposed a critical flaw in how early literacy and dyslexia risk are addressed. In short, too late, too manually and too inconsistently,” he adds.

“Our system, which is called Alpaca (Assessing Letter and Phonemic Awareness Class Assistant), was designed to fix this by using AI to capture difficulty signals at scale. Alpaca is not a test. It’s an AI-enabled decision-support tool that is inclusive, universal and offers real-time diagnosis and intervention tracking.”

In practice, Alpaca works like a normal screen-based game. Children (wearing headphones) play the game with Archie the alpaca without even knowing they’re being assessed.

Each child plays on their own. The system can screen six children in 20 minutes and provide an instant insight into their functional reading ability. The idea is that schools will use Alpaca to screen pupils three times a year in the first two years of their formal education. Dashboards show teachers what’s working, for whom and where they need to intervene.

“What makes Alpaca different is not just its speed; it’s the system it transforms while integrating seamlessly into existing classroom routines,” Fernandez says.

“Models analyse early learning data to flag children on a probable pathway to dyslexia, and longitudinal tracking enables schools to monitor growth, not just capture a snapshot.

“We provide parental and psychologist pathways to guide affordable, structured follow-up while teacher CPD [continuing professional development] in this area is automatically aligned to class needs and educators have hard evidence with which to inform educational policy.”

Primary schools (internationally) are the company’s sweet spot, and in 2023/2024 the system was used to screen 25,000 children in pilots in six countries.

This year, the company is hoping to screen 30,000 junior and senior infants across Ireland. Alpaca is fully web-based and sold to schools on a SaaS basis.

The system will travel with appropriate customisation for language, culture and curriculum and Ireland, Britain and the UAE are the markets most in the company’s sights for now.

Later this year, it will launch a funding round of €1.5 million to support key hires, new product development and trials in the UK and UAE. The company is also working on a stand-alone diagnostic and support B2C product for parents.

It has taken around €500,000 to bring the company to its current stage of development between commercialisation funding from Enterprise Ireland, founder capital and grants. Support of various sorts for the venture has also been provided by Dublin Local Enterprise Office, NovaUCD, WestBIC and UCD’s CeADAR centre for AI.

“Our vision is to be the trusted leader in early intervention, diagnosis and support for children with dyslexia, bridging the gap between early identification and formal diagnosis,” Fernandez says.

“By 2028, we aim to screen one million children worldwide each year, powering smarter schools, supporting better-trained teachers and giving families earlier answers, faster action and more hope. We are building a world where no child waits to fail, no parent fights for help, teachers lead with insight, not intuition, and policy is built on data, not delay.”