Queen’s Speech

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 17th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it is always a challenge and a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. Following up on one point, I would say that she is absolutely right: I do not think many people care whether their school has the label of “academy”, “maintained”, or “run by the small green men from outer Mars”—as long as the damn thing works. If you get the children through with the grades, the incentives and what they need for the next stage—and enjoying the process, I hope, or at least some of it—everybody is reasonably happy. I hope that this will be acknowledged when we get down to the joyful little slugfest that will be that Bill.

The main thrust of what I want to say is to ask the Minister for a little context about how the work that we are doing to review special educational needs will fit into this Bill. The first clause of the Bill suggests that the Secretary of State will do lots of things and set standards. I remind the House of my interests, particularly that I am dyslexic and president of the British Dyslexia Association. Special educational needs include a huge range of subjects, all requiring slightly different approaches to get the best out of the people who fall into these categories. Usually, they are not by themselves; usually, there is another factor behind the real, serious problems.

The weirdest thing about the system we have is that very severe problems stand a better chance of getting through because they are spotted. The students concerned may have greater problems in life et cetera but, if you have something obvious, you will normally get help. There will be many dyslexics but they are not just dyslexic; you can add in dyscalculia, dyspraxia, attention deficit disorder and high-functioning autism. These are people who will be within the normal classroom; how are possibly five such students in every classroom to be accommodated? Two or three children may have all these conditions combined; it is not that uncommon. How do we make sure that there is enough flexibility in our teaching approaches to ensure these children will get through?

Am I overreacting about this? Well, systematic synthetic phonics—if I have the term right; I often manage to get it wrong when talking to people—is supposed to be the way you teach people English. That is great, but it does not work for dyslexics because it puts too much pressure on one of the areas of short-term memory that we are bad at. So we have a fundamental problem; we need to use something else, another way to get through. How are we to institute that?

If we have a system where the Secretary of State says, “This is the way we’ll do it”, will we ensure that he is advised so that we get enough information and flexibility, and enough training into the normal classroom—I emphasise “the normal classroom”—to allow these people who are there in considerable numbers, reckoned to be 20% of the school population, to function?

What use are we going to make of technology? I know that the noble Baroness is doing some work on this, and I appreciate that, but it should be written into the Bill that you will need, for instance, flexible choices to get the best out of technology. I have yet to see somebody who would object to me word-processing by speaking to a computer—as is my day-to-day existence—as opposed to tapping a keyboard. Nobody cares. You are still communicating using the written language, so who cares? That is just one example of how you could use technology. Are we going to take that on board and build the flexibility in?

I hope that, over the next few months, we will get a system where, whatever comes out of this, we will have instituted the fact that one size does not fit all, even if fits most. We have a bit of change and a little give will be in the system. We will help ourselves and have more people getting through. Whether that will be enough to hit our 90% target, I know not—and I suspect not —but we may do better than we are at the moment.