JULIAN Elliott can vividly remember the very first child he saw as an educational psychologist. It was a boy who had a range of learning difficulties. He also remembers the first thing the boy's mother said to him as he began his appraisal of her son.

"The mother said: 'At the end of this assessment, what I hope you can do is give me a label as to what is wrong with my child'," he says. "There is a belief that if you get this label, people will take you seriously."

It is this belief which helps explain the sometimes vitriolic reaction to Professor Elliott's reported views on dyslexia. The British Dyslexia Association has called his views, "very damaging and insulting to people who are trying to overcome their dyslexia". Emails over the last few days have been more direct.

"Are you saying my child is faking it?", says one. "Are you saying my child doesn't have a reading problem but in actuality is stupid?", reads another. "You are the kind of man who does untold damage to people who are dyslexic and the reason the local education authority manages to fail us," and more personal still: "You are a dangerous man".

For parents who have battled to have their children diagnosed as dyslexic, and not just "stupid", the challenge to the existence of the condition, at least as it is commonly understood, threatens not only their child's self-esteem, but also the additional help they have been able to win.

After 30 years in education, first as a teacher of children with reading difficulties, then as an educational psychologist, and now as professor of education at Durham University, Prof Elliott is well aware of the strength of feeling on this issue, and of the likely controversy his views would provoke.

The storm broke with the publication of a newspaper article over the weekend, when he questioned the value of the term dyslexia to describe a range of learning difficulties, and is likely to be given additional strength by his appearance in a C4 programme tonight, provocatively titled: The Dyslexia Myth.

But he says much of the criticism is based on a misunderstanding, or more accurately a series of misunderstandings. He is not, he says, suggesting that dyslexia doesn't exist at all. Nor is he saying that children who are diagnosed as dyslexic are, in fact, just not very bright. Most importantly, he is not saying that children with reading difficulties should not get extra help. In fact, he is saying the opposite: that all children with problems should be given support, and should not have to wait to be diagnosed as dyslexic.

His views were first aired publicly in his book, Children in Difficulty, published in 1998, and revised last year. This was a result of talking to experts and surveying the available studies on the subject, and in turn led to his involvement in tonight's programme.

But his interest in the subject dates back at least to a conversation many years ago with a colleague who had been struggling to ascertain whether a particular child was dyslexic or not. In the end, the conclusion was that he was. But it was the subsequent exchange which set Prof Elliott's mind going.

"I asked what his recommendation was, and he said he had put him on a particular programme to help with reading. I asked what would he have done if he had decided the child was not dyslexic. There was a long pause, and he said sheepishly: 'I would have put him on the same programme'. That was quite informative at an early stage in my career," he says.

The problem, he says, is that dyslexia has been turned into a catch-all to describe any reading problem. Among academics and practitioners, there is a consensus that dyslexia is best used to describe problems in decoding text, being able to relate sounds in spoken language to written symbols. This affects about one to two per cent of the population, and research is ongoing as to the cause.

But the term dyslexia has been so broadened - taking in anything up to ten per cent of the population - that it has lost its meaning. This expansion, he believes, is the result of our need to attach a label to a problem, in the assumption that this means it can be cured, an assumption that has little use as far as reading problems are concerned.

"If you go to a doctor and you have got a bad arm, the diagnosis is crucial because it tells the medic what the treatment should be, and people believe the same thing about reading," he says. "There is a human need to come up with a category which describes some experience we have which is a problem for us.

"But because dyslexia describes a whole range of problems, it doesn't point to any one solution. There is no evidence that, if somebody is dyslexic, this is the treatment that works."

Part of the reason why some parents battle to have their children diagnosed as dyslexic is to refute the suggestion that they are not very bright. But Prof Elliott says this is based on a mistaken link between reading ability and intelligence. Just as people who have difficulty reading are not necessarily lacking in intelligence, so those diagnosed as dyslexic are not necessarily bright.

"There is no relationship between intelligence and people's ability to read. The ability to read is not a high-level intellectual activity. There are some kids who are intellectually limited but can read text extremely well, although they may not necessarily understand what it is they are reading, and you find some geniuses who have trouble decoding text even though they have a very good understanding of what it is they are reading," he says.

"People have this notion that if you are described as dyslexic, it means you have reading problems but you are intelligent. The reality about children with reading difficulties is there are some really bright ones, some middle ones and some less bright ones."

But he goes further than this. Not only has the use of the term dyslexia become meaningless, there is a danger that, because of this, only some children will receive help. The other reason parents are often keen to have their child diagnosed as dyslexic is that it opens the door to additional help, whether it is allocation of a teaching assistant or extra time in exams. The difficulty here, Prof Elliott says, is what that means for children who struggle with reading but are not diagnosed.

"If you have two children with learning difficulties and Child A gets diagnosed as dyslexic and Child B doesn't, are we saying Child A is more intelligent or should get more support? If we're saying that, what about Child B?," he says.

"If they should be getting help as well, then you are talking about all children with reading problems getting help. If this term provides additional resources for some children but not for others who don't have that term, then there may be winners and losers."

His conclusion is that all children who have reading difficulties should be given help appropriate for their particular problem, and at an early stage, without having to wait to be diagnosed as dyslexic, or not.

"I understand the strength of emotion of some parents because so many have had distressing experiences," he says. "But we're absolutely trying to do exactly what these parents want.

"For them to get what they want for their kids they have to take a route which we're arguing they shouldn't have to take. You shouldn't have to go through complex assessments before services are provided.

"We should be focussing on trying to reduce these problems at a very early age, for all children with literacy difficulties. All children with reading difficulties must be taken seriously."

* Dispatches: The Dyslexia Myth is on C4 tonight, 9pm