Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my interests as set out in the register.

Something that has run through everything we have said about special educational needs is that there is a series of hurdles to get through. The first is to be recognised and the second is to access the help that is required. I will concentrate my few minutes on the first.

If you do not get an identification, everything else is doomed. Oddly, if you have a physical disability that is obvious to anyone, that would probably be slightly less of a problem. If you are on the neurodiverse spectrum—the one that I know best—and you have a dramatic failure, you are much more likely to be identified. The problem is that most people are not in those categories. We need somebody within the school structure who can spot developmental problems, whether it is in very early years or further along.

One-off systems will not work, because virtually everything we have been talking about here comes under the heading of a spectrum. The diversity within spectrums means that people will have different levels in the manifestation of their problems with the education system in front of them. If they do not have a problem with it, we do not worry. Will the Government take the first steps to make sure that there are more people who can spot these problems within the school system? If we do that, we stand a chance of getting that person, their parents and the system to come round and say, “Yes, let’s work differently”.

Once the person has been identified—I am probably again clinging back to nurse and my own group first, but it is applicable—if the school does not have the relevant knowledge, it tends to suddenly says, “Oh, we’ll give you extra help”. If you are a dyslexic with a bad short-term memory and bad language processing skills, and you fail on the work that everybody else is doing in the classroom, you will simply fail some more if you are given more of the work that you failed at. The same will be true of other conditions.

What is needed is somebody who will temper that work to the individual needs of the person. That requires knowledge and, above all, flexibility. Do you have the capacity in the school system not to say what should be being done but to ask what the best result we can get is? If you do not, you are, in effect, condemning more people to fail—and to fail in a way that will probably be disruptive to others around them.

When she comes to reply, will the Minister say what plans the Government have for better identification throughout the school system? There is so much that can be done from this good start, including the accurate engagement of parents. I have heard it said that special educational needs are for posh kids, because they are the ones who can fight through and get the identification. If the Minister wants to leave with one great claim to fame at the end of her time in office or her Government’s, it should be to get the schools to say, “Your child has a problem. Here’s a solution”. Parents should not have to go banging on doors, asking, “Why is my child not succeeding? I have spoken to an expert”. Change that and you change everything.