Educational Opportunities: Working Classes

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness. I do not know if I agree with everything she said, but I agree with a lot of it. I volunteered to speak in this debate because it follows one yesterday—I remind the House of my declared interests—in which I talked special educational needs. I did not have a chance to raise how the parents have to take on a huge responsibility for this group, because the school system seems to be failing them. Teachers are not trained to deal with most of the commonly occurring special educational needs—I have already referred to my interest in dyslexia—and parents traditionally have to step in. They normally step in to get the diagnosis in the first place. They have to notice that the child is underachieving or not achieving in certain ways. That means they need to know what the norm and the expectation are. If you do not have a background in education, you are less likely to know that. Then, once you have done that, you have to take on the system, to an extent. You need to start putting pressure on the teacher and the structures around you to say, “Why are you not doing it?” This means writing letters. Good literacy helps. Knowing how to access forms and look things up are all part of it. The tiger parent gets results.

Then look at straightforward cash. It costs £500, maybe £600, to get, privately, a diagnosis for these hidden disabilities. Other situations may vary. That is a big chunk. It is more than you would get from one week on the national minimum wage. Then, it is reckoned to cost about £1,000 a year to keep the pressure on and make sure you get the support for that child and the things they are missing at school. The people I have been speaking to reckon that, if you have to go to appeal, it costs over £6,000. At least 15% of the population have special educational needs according to the Government, and virtually everybody agrees that that is an underdiagnosis. It is reckoned that 80% of those with dyslexia are undiagnosed through the school system.

There is another, small element that goes into the bigger cocktail the noble Baroness has identified, and which may ensure that your chances of success are that bit lower. Everything is on a downward multiplier. You are being pressured to do things that you just cannot do if you do not have the resources or understand the education system that well. I do not know how many times I have had a conversation with a parent who said, “I have a dyslexic child and, by the way, I think I am dyslexic as well.” The same is true of dyspraxia and autism. With that sort of pressure, we will not get out of this until we start to have better education for teachers and make the system slightly friendlier to enable them to implement those changes. All these small changes will help but unless we keep an eye on them and how they fit together, we will miss out. Please can we hear how the Government are going to make sure that parents with lower educational attainment know how to access the help that the middle- classes are clearly getting?