Queen’s Speech

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I put my name down to speak in this debate, I must admit that it was to make a general point about something that has been missed. However, it fits into the last few speeches because the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, spoke about the confusing state of education and the organisation of schools. This has also led to a slightly confusing state when it comes to teacher training, with various levels of qualification going in and out, and leads directly to the point that I shall make. Here, I come to my more familiar ground and if the rest of the House wants to put itself into doze mode as I talk about dyslexia and other special educational needs, I would not hold it against any of your Lordships.

Teacher training has one great hole in it: the fact that it does not train people properly to deal with those with special educational needs through specialist training. Dyslexia is reckoned by everybody outside government to affect 10% of the population, while the Government reckon that it is 8%. Let us compromise on 9%, so that in a standard classroom you will normally get only two point something or three such people in there, although getting four or five will be as common as getting none. We have accepted that we need to do more work here. Indeed, from the previous Government I pay tribute to Sarah Teather, who set up the process of the special educational needs bit of the Children and Families Act, to David Laws, who saw it through, and indeed to the noble Lord, Lord Nash, who got that Bill through this House. I understand that it is a busy day but I hope that the Government Front Bench will convey the fact that I appreciate the work that the Minister did on the process of that Bill, because he listened.

If we are to go through a process where we extend the time over which people need to be trained, would it not be sensible to make sure that teachers—the initial people you are talking about—have the skills to identify those with different learning patterns from the rest of those in their classrooms? I was thinking of another way of describing this but I am afraid that I have come down to only one: it is the bleeding obvious. Three of your normal class do not have the same learning pattern because they are dyslexic. Their brains do not process information in the same way and they have bad short-term memories. When chalk and talk are used—that is, to convey information to them—they cannot absorb it in the same way. We then come to those with dyscalculia or dyspraxia, who will have other problems. Once again, they will not be able to process the information in the same way as the norm. Then we could put in people with things such as autism, most of whom are at the high-functioning end. They will have other social problems, which will mean that they will not relate to the classroom properly or absorb the information. If the teacher cannot spot this, he cannot make any adaptations to their learning style. You are effectively asking somebody to make bricks without straw.

Who has said that it would be a good idea to bring this in? I have a list of reports from the past few years and I have excluded from it all those with “dyslexia” in the title. We have had the Rose review, the SEND code of practice and the Driver Youth Trust with its lovely report, titled The Fish in the Tree. There was the Every Child a Chance Trust report and the Carter review. There was a report from the Communication Trust—the list goes on. Everybody has agreed that this is a huge hole because you are asking the professional to do something which they are not trained to do. The result is that we have people who cannot join in the process of education because they have problems processing.

The Government could turn around and say, “Let’s have a few more specialists”. That falls down quickly because if you do not identify the person to be put in front of the specialist, you cannot get the help—and the people who always end up getting the worst deal are those just on the edge, who are not very obvious. Dyslexia in particular is called the middle-class disease but that is wrong. It is the exam-passing classes’ disease because what happens now is that a parent says, “Why is my child not achieving?”. They take it to the teacher and then the teacher goes, “Oh, I’m not sure. Do you think that it could be dyslexia?”. There is then a legal struggle to get that person assessed. I want, in the course of this Government, to get a little closer to where the teacher turns round to the parent and says, “Your child is not achieving because I think they could have one of these hidden disabilities”. If we do that, we will address many of the problems and make the job of the teacher, and the whole process, much easier.

I come back to my point: it is the bleeding obvious. Unless we are prepared to take something along the lines that will improve the situation, we will be guaranteed a continued amount of failure—and the costs that go with it in those who cannot find employment or access the norms of procedure, as we have heard about before. Why should they, since it does not apply to them? Unless we start to do this, we will be storing up more trouble. I encourage all in this House to pay attention to this because one small change—an extra week of training, in a course of about a year—could have massive, positive results for the whole of society.