Autism

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to be backing up the noble Baroness on this subject. If we are breaking the rules and saying “my noble friend”, then to hell with the rules, basically.

We are returning to a subject on which I feel there is going to be a tremendous amount of agreement; the downside is the fact that we are having to say it again. We have had to say this very often. The main thrust is that we have specific legislation that backs up other general legislation, giving rights to these people and responsibilities to the state that are simply not being enacted. That is the long and the short of it. There are a series of rights and, as the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, has just pointed out, the people who get them are the ones who fight and get it recognised. There is an old cliché about anyone who has been involved in any part of the disability movement: if you want to be a successful disabled person, choose your parents very carefully. I think that the best combination is a journalist and a lawyer—a person who will tell you about the law and someone to tell those who are not enacting the law publicly that they have failed. I have seen over and again that the person who shouts, with the right language and in the right way, gets their rights. The rest do not.

The experiences of autism are so similar to the world that I come from—that is, of dyslexia—that it is not worth setting out any differences between them; the principle applies to both. Then we have the joys and delights of co-occurrence of disability, which is very common. All these things come down to the fact that we have a series of pieces of legislation that are not being enacted correctly, and we have to drag people into enacting them.

Before I move on to my main point, I want to back up one point that the noble Baroness made. All these hidden disabilities seem to suggest in their initial stages that the males with the condition greatly outnumbered the females. Then a combination of practice and new social mores when looking at people showed that this was not the case, or at least that the discrepancy was not nearly as great as had previously been conceived. I hope that the Minister will have some way of looking at that and saying exactly how often this occurs. It is quite clear in all these hidden disabilities that the female of the species is much better at keeping its head down, not getting spotted, not causing trouble and not attracting attention. If we can look at that, we might start to get an idea of the true picture because it is also true in all these cases that the male who follows that example is ignored. Can we have a look at that type of behaviour?

I want to draw attention to something that the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, mentioned in passing: education. At the moment, when it comes to special educational needs, a teacher who is going to receive dozens of groups and several predominant groups might receive an afternoon or a couple of hours on the subject. I met a young man, introduced to me by a volunteer in my office, who had missed his special educational needs unit because he had had a doctor’s appointment that day and was under no pressure to go back and take it. Two hours. Could noble Lords learn to spell dyscalculic, dyslexic or autism, if they did not know already, in two hours, even if they do not have one of those conditions? I rather doubt it. Effectively, what we seem to be assuming in teacher education is a slap in the face.

Remember how much time people spend in classrooms. Remember how much time those at the higher end of the autistic spectrum, those who do not have the glaringly obvious problems, will spend there. There is so much opportunity for a teacher who has at least some awareness training to be able to say, “I think this child has a particular problem. They will need to be told about it and they need strategies in their learning and social behaviour to enable them to function in society”. Even if you do not go to a formal diagnosis but have some awareness that you might be there, just think about how much potential that could release. Think about how you might be able to get somebody in a position where they could handle further education better, or higher education. We have passed Acts and done things that enable people to get through this. We give them extra money, extra time. We have just passed things that gave them this ability. If you do not identify and support in the teaching staff, you are missing the chance to make a person aware that they are doing this and you will not be able to say, “You need to take a slightly different teaching strategy to get the best out of this person and you will get them through”. How much waste is actually built into the system there?

Is this a wonderful revelation from me? No, it was first put forward in the Lamb review. I think that was in 2009; I cannot remember off the top of my head. The difference between dyslexics and autistics is that we do not like facts and figures in nice, straight lines. I do not know how co-occurrence happens. It is an established principle that we have badly trained teachers in this area. Unless we can get in there, we will ensure that we do not identify them, and, even if we have identified, we will make sure that that teacher does not know how to adapt the lesson to get the best out of it. This is made even more absurd when we take on the fact that they have a legal duty to teach that person.

Effectively, in this huge part of a person’s life, teachers at the moment have a legal duty to do something which they are not trained to do. That is a disaster for anybody who has problems with learning patterns that are not of the mainstream. Autism just happens to be one of the more glaring examples.