Assistive Technology: Support for Special Educational Needs

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 25th May 2023 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Addington]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the use of assistive technology to support those with special educational needs.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Haskel) (Lab)]

I call the noble Lord, Lord Addington.

--- Later in debate ---

[A noble Lord]

Hear, hear!

[Lord Addington (LD)]

There is an old joke that when you get applause at the start of a speech, you should sit down and take it.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

No, carry on.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I want first to thank everybody who has taken the time to get here this late on a Thursday when we have a recess coming up. I should also make a declaration of interests, the most important of which is that I am chairman of Microlink PC. It is one of the bigger companies in this country, if not the biggest, dealing with this issue. There are many fields and many pies here; we have fingers in many of them.

My other interest is that I am president of the British Dyslexia Association and dyslexic. My last interest, which I probably do not have to declare but which is relevant to everything else, is that my life was transformed about 25 years ago when I got working assistive technology. I am a severe dyslexic; the way I communicated a written message was to dictate it. Suddenly, when I got assistive technology, I could do it myself, so if I sound a little messianic on this it is because I am talking from my own experience.

That was happening to somebody who had managed to get through the system due largely to the influence—shall we say?—of a tiger parent. It got me through the system, into the university structure and out the other side, because once you get over the first hurdle, people are generally quite willing towards you. Once you have proved you have some capacity, they are there to invest in you.

Unfortunately, most people do not have that support and help, or it is not given effectively, or they are simply missed. The most common experience for somebody with SENs, particularly with a neurodiverse background, is that you are told to try harder and work harder. We need the capacity to spot those with problems and then go to that wonderful and expanding box of tricks, which can help you get through. It is dependent on you having a working platform for it—normally, it is a computer; a tablet or something might work, but you need something to use it on. Once you have that, many things become possible.

So far, I have been talking about things which are to do with the communication of information. There are those Members—I am looking across the Room at two of them—who will have experience of bits of supportive technology that help with movement and other forms of support. I look forward to hearing about them.

I could mention all the areas where assistive technology is used, but we have only an hour. I could also mention the products if we had a couple of weeks—I reckon that there are about 40,000 of them. It is about making sure that people know what is out there and getting the right thing in front of them. The real point of this Question is what the Government are doing to make sure that happens. What the benefit is to the state is a reasonable question to ask on every occasion.

If you have assistive technology, and you need it, you stand a chance of becoming an independent and, one hopes, positive economic influence in your society. It may not be impossible otherwise, but it is much more difficult. Occasionally, you hear people talk about “the exceptional people who get through”. Any system that is dependent on you being either brilliant or lucky has fundamentally failed, so I hope that we will get a better understanding of what the Government are going to do about utilising this box of tools to allow people to go forward. That is really what I am aiming at today.

Look at our current system. I appreciate that the Government are now starting to look at and take some steps on it. The system we devised has a graduated approach up to the education, health and care plan, which replaced the old statement. I know the Government are working on making this an easier process but, let us face it, if it works it will be a little like the cavalry coming over the hill. It has become a legal process and it has probably done more to benefit specialist legal firms dealing with the education sector than anyone else. The Minister was not on that Bill, but I was, so maybe I should take some of the blame: we did not see it coming.

One of the other things that has happened is that the graduated approach that was supposed to come in behind it has become virtually irrelevant for many. The experience of many people I have spoken to is that you need the support of the plan to access help. Assistive technology is potentially much cheaper, if you have identified it correctly and got through. The problem is identifying who will benefit from it, even including those in the neurodiverse spectrum. I am going to talk about the needs closest to me, simply because I understand them slightly better.

For somebody who is dyslexic, identifying their level of need and the problem early enough means you stand a chance of bringing them assistance. The same is true of dyspraxia, dyscalculia and ADHD. There are a lot of devices here that will help all of them. Indeed, the same devices are often used differently. Trying to get them at the right time is about the identification process.

A lot of people are talking about screening programmes. How are we getting these screening programmes to identify people? With the best will in the world, people will be needed to administer them and, at the moment, the consensus is that people in the education sector are not well trained enough. I am sceptical about whether the new level 3 SENCO is the answer. The Minister will undoubtedly tell me otherwise, but are they going to identify and get people in the right way? Do the teachers know how to administer the screening process to identify that group?

Let us face it: no system is perfect, certainly not in its first phase. What will we do afterwards? The noble Baroness was instrumental in making me have a discussion with those providing alternative provision—AP. The one question that I asked them, which I was worried about, was what they were doing about screening when people get into AP. They said, “We are relying on the rest of the education system”. The noble Baroness said, and everybody agreed—when everybody agrees in politics you know something will go wrong—that most people in AP have a special educational need, almost by definition. Relying on the rest of the education system to spot it cannot be right; you will need another degree of assessment, because presumably somebody has already been missed.

If you can get assistive technology to somebody, they will have something that they can take with them to deal with things in a certain way, or at least to stand a chance. The identification of need tells them another thing: you can succeed; you can take part and join in. That is why I am trying to find out what the Government’s policy is. It is about that degree of training, support and structure: “Here’s a tool; get in there”.

It is also an opportunity to break the cycle of depending on a tiger parent. This is why, for instance, dyslexia was thought of as the middle-class disease—“exam-passing disease” would probably be a better term. Parents who have aspiration and have got through themselves ask, “Why is my child not the same?”

All the conditions that I have spoken about today have similar stories attached to them. There is a very black-humour joke: if you want to be a successful disabled child, choose your parents correctly. That has been true until this point and it is another condemnation of the system we have at the moment; you have had to fight to get through it.

Are we going to train teachers well enough to use this and give it to a person so that they can act on it for themselves for the rest of their lives? We should remember that most of these children are going to grow up. I have concentrated on education here but, hopefully, the workplace is waiting. What are we going to do? Can we make sure that people are prepared to take on this role?

I hope the Minister has some good news for me about the process and access to it, and can tell me that schools understand it and will bring it in. It should give independence, be cheaper and allow that person to have a model of process that is relevant outside the classroom. Traditional types of help, such as 25% extra time, are not going to be a great deal of help for you if you have to fill out a form at work under pressure, or if you have to complete a task on time. We need skills that are transferable. Assistive technology has the capacity to take on at least some of that role.

I hope the Minister and indeed all others here will put pressure on the Government to ensure that we take advantage of this, because if we do not we are missing a trick that can make people’s lives better, save money in the long term and improve the strength of our workforce. This is one occasion when the ha’porth of tar should be put on the boat.