Loose Woman Frankie Bridge has broken down in tears as she opens up about her 10-year-old son Carter’s worsening dyslexia and the difficult decision she needs to make
Frankie Bridge cries in her car over parenting dilemma
Former Saturdays star Frankie Bridge, 37, has opened up about her impossible dilemma when it comes to her son Carter’s dyslexia – and admitted she’s struggling to cope.
Speaking emotionally on her YouTube vlog, the star revealed that her little boy’s dyslexia has got much worse since he was diagnosed last year. And she and husband Wayne are now agonising over whether to send him to an expensive specialist school which is far from home.
Carter was diagnosed in 2025 with the learning difficulty, which can make accurate and fluent word reading and spelling hard – and affect people of all intellects.
Frankie, who also shares elder son Parker, 12, with former footie star Wayne, confessed she was feeling ‘trapped’ and doesn’t know ‘what the right thing is for him anymore’ after leaving him off at school in tears.
She said, “I, today, went to see a specialist dyslexic school for Carter. His recent assessment is that he is severely dyslexic, and he’s worse than his last assessment.
“[The assessor] said that, because of the effect of him moving school so many times, and having to readjust to new environments, new teachers, new friends, or whatever, obviously that’s affected his confidence and to move him now probably wouldn’t be the best thing for him.”
His anguished mum broke down in tears as she shared the worried parents’ big dilemma for September, when Carter starts secondary school, debating whether a specialist school would better suit his needs.
“There is one not far – I mean, it is quite far from us for a drop-off and a pickup point of view. I’m not really sure how we’d make it work.”
Explaining her initial doubts, she said: ‘If I’m honest with you, I kind of wanted to hate it… I guess it’s the fear of putting a kid in something different.’
But she was also impressed by the school, adding, ‘It’s very similar to the school he’s in now, it’s just every class, everyone at the school is dyslexic and every class is catered to be able to teach children with dyslexia, they don’t need one on one, because the whole class is doing the same thing, because everyone’s dyslexic.”
“The whole point of the [specialist] school is to get them to a level where they’re confident enough within themselves and they know enough to be able to go back into the mainstream school.”
She went on to say that sending Carter to such a school would be a strain on the family, both in logistical and financial terms.
“It’s not an ideal scenario for us because it’s far away and it’s really f***ing expensive. ‘But it was lovely. And I think his confidence has been so battered that I’m like, how lovely to put him in an environment where he doesn’t feel different, and that he’s actually being set up for success rather than failure.”
Frankie added: ‘He’s had to move to so many different schools, and nothing’s been able to meet his needs. I just don’t know if it’s realistic for us as a family, for us to be able to get him there and back every day.’
The TV star then broke down, as she detailed a recent episode where she recalled dropping Carter off at school one morning in tears about his maths – ‘his hardest subject by a mile’.
Frankie said: “I find it mentally just so hard that I just never know what to do, what’s best for him.
“There’ll be so many parents out there, I know, that have to drop their kids off, crying at school every day. I just feel a bit worn down by it now. I just feel a bit trapped because, obviously, they have to go to school.
“He’s been to so many different schools that I just can’t move him again. And I just don’t know what the right thing is for him anymore.”
She added: “We try so much, and we’ve been lucky to be able to give him different opportunities with different people. And I know he has more opportunity than some, but it’s just breaking my heart having to keep pushing him. He’s just got so long left at school.”
The former pop star then compared Carter’s school experience with that of his older brother Parker, explaining, “Parker had extra help when he was younger and now he’s so solid at school. He can just get on with it. Don’t get me wrong, he’s like, middle of the road, but he works really hard.”
“When you’ve got one kid that it just comes easily to, and you can see how, for most people, that’s how it is, it’s just very hard.”
When Frankie first revealed Carter’s dyslexia diagnosis last year – explaining that he’d been diagnosed at 8, she admitted that it had been a ‘battle’ to get him support at the school he was at.
She said he’d ‘cried for an hour’ about going to school and repeatedly asked to be homeschooled, adding, “I feel really helpless, and I don’t know what else I can do for him really.”
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