King’s Speech

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I follow the noble Baroness who has just sat down in thanking the maiden speakers in this debate: the noble Lords, Lord Hobby and Lord Blackwater, and my noble friends Lord Dixon and Lady Leaman. I think we are going to hear a wee bit more about them. I am very glad to have my two colleagues with me today, because I am looking forward to offloading on them a great deal of the work I am currently having to do. “Sorry, this is what you’re here for”.

What attracted me to speak to speak in this debate will come as no surprise to anybody. It is the proposed Bill on special educational needs. It was over 39 years ago that I made my maiden speech on the subject. It was then something of a novelty: dyslexia in my case. We all have our little part of this fence to jump over. It was, “Oh, haven’t you done jolly well to have got to university?”

It is not quite that now, but there is still a slightly patronising attitude in certain quarters, and there is always somebody saying, “Oh, just try harder”. It does not work that way. Anybody who has a special educational need and is identified as part of the neurodiverse community has a brain that works slightly differently. You process information differently. That is why you need special education—that is, different education—to get through.

When the Bill comes forward, the opening statement from the Government Front Bench saying they would make sure this was a part of how a school is assessed and how you do it is probably the first step that should be taken. After that, you will need a trained workforce that accepts that you have to get in and teach differently. Then you have to define what you are doing, and this is where I start disagreeing with the Government.

As I have said, I am a dyslexic, I am president of the British Dyslexia Association and I am chairman of a company, Microlink PC, that deals in technology supporting people, usually with disabilities but anybody who has got a problem—we put the package together.

You have to work differently; “special” here does not mean anything other than “different”. You have a different pathway through. In the case of dyslexics— I will stick to nurse, if the House will permit me to at this point—I am not going to handle huge amounts of written work or having to take notes; I did not in my education process and I have not in this House, but I will be able to do it if I use technology and listen, so this is quite a friendly place for me. If we bring that into the classroom and make sure people implement that, dyslexics—10% of the population—stand a chance of achieving their full potential. If the Government make sure people are trained and people are assessed, they will stand a chance.

We have a very short time to get this in place by the end of the Parliament. We need real energy here, and we need to make sure that people are checking that it happens. If that does not occur, we will not achieve and there will be another list of things which are not happening. It will be difficult to maintain this with the rest of this Bill as it goes through Parliament, but please remember that learning differently will give people the chance of getting out there so they can function independently for the rest of their lives. That is what it should be about.