Special Educational Needs: Dyscalculia

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, first, I declare my interests: I am dyslexic, I am president of the British Dyslexia Association and I am chairman of a company that deals with assistive technology. Having done that, I welcome two more Members to the “mafia of misspelling”. We would take over the world, but one of us would jot down the name of where we had the first conspiracy wrong and the other one would misread it—so you are comparatively safe for a bit.

When she started this debate, the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, put her finger absolutely on why this is important: the gateway subjects to progress in this country are GCSE maths and English, and this has driven much of our recent education policy. If we ignore that reality, we are not going to get anywhere. The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, mentioned that we are now moving back towards more practical-based, relevant knowledge-based subjects. Everything he said about maths being a practical subject has been said to me about English. It may have been a great original thought, but I am afraid he has friends out there.

I thought that I was the going to be first person to speak about technology and apps, but no, somebody has beaten me to it. I am not sure whether this is irritating or reassuring, but there is a degree of consensus here. We have to work around this problem. If we still take these two subjects as roadblocks, we are going to have problems. It is also fair to say that, in our society, it has been more acceptable to be bad at maths than bad at English.

Those are the two gateway subjects, but you used to be able to get around it and say that it was fine and did not matter. Good old sexism also kicked in: we do not spot girls with special educational needs as easily because they tend to handle the classroom better and do not kick off as much. All these are reasonably accepted factors. However, to deal with this, if we accept that we need education to happen, we have to start taking the maths side more seriously. The first thing the Government could do is to say that dyscalculia is the appropriate word or come up with another one, because it is not recognised at the moment. That is a small change, but if the Minister could address that in her answer, it would be very helpful. I would like a reason why it has not happened yet, because it is just a word.

If noble Lords think that this does not matter, let me take them to a conference. It is a dyslexia conference but, hey, the BDA does cover dyscalculia on its website and does work on it, so we are not all bad; it is not often that I say that we have come across as the big bad bully who gets all the attention. Had noble Lords been with me at this conference, we would have got to the great bane of the modern education system—the lawyers, making presentations about how you get your education, health and care plan. This was at the start of the process, because we needed them to fight through. This lawyer said, “Oh no, you don’t need that, because dyscalculia is a special educational maths problem”, and he went on for about half an hour. Of course, everybody is going to learn that, are they not? One word really would help. If it is not dyscalculia—I thought I had problems with pronunciation, but it would appear that I have cracked this one and others have not—could we come up with another one or a better definition?

Knowing and having a reference point will help, because you will know what to refer back to. Saying that it is “dyslexia with numbers” does not help. As it was explained to me, it is about finding the actual concept of mathematics very difficult—the difference between one and many and everything in between, or having problems with counting backwards. You cannot do it, and you have to start again; you just do not get the concept.

Although the Government have made this wonderful statement that every teacher is a teacher of special educational needs, if they do not know what they are doing then I would wish that they were not. Sticking with English and maths, they will have already failed in these two basic subjects. If you have already failed in a classroom and the help is more of the same, you will get more failure. We must remember that we need specific help for this; we cannot use the same apps or the same teaching techniques. We must address that. If we are to have this wonderful change, with everybody teaching special educational needs, where is the training? Where is the focus? Where is the training to do no harm—to borrow from medicine? Let us not compound failure. I thought I might make a joke about it taking me only three attempts to pass maths, and mine was only a CSE, but let us forget about that.

We have to think about how to address this problem properly. It is not about having more of the same, and it is not “Try harder”—I am very glad that nobody here has said that. As the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, put it, it is about expectation. We need to make sure to move the barrier to allow somebody to have realistic expectation. I have not said anything about dyspraxia; we will save that for another day. Making sure that the teachers know what they are doing is the first step.