King’s Speech

Lord Addington Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Jolly, with a sense of sadness. She is someone who arrived, went straight into the hard work and has stayed there for such a long period of time. We will miss her at all levels, and I hope that her retirement in north Cornwall is fun—fun should come first, she deserves that—and also that she does not gloat too publicly about it.

When it comes to maiden speeches today, there is of course the noble Baroness, Lady Smith. I congratulate her both on her role and a very good speech. With her track record, what else did we expect? I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, as well. Both speeches were linked by the emphasis on education, and it is there that I would like to put most of my efforts, although the noble Lord, Lord Wrottesley, just spoke about the football Bill. I will be having a good look at that, about whether we can get something for sport in general out of that bit of administrative mess. Let us wait and see.

When it comes to education, I will concentrate on the area where I have to declare interests. I am chairman of Microlink PC, an assistive technology company, president of the British Dyslexia Association, and I am severely dyslexic myself—that is, apparently, the official definition.

When I look at the current state of special educational needs in this country, I know why these things were done. The road to hell is paved with good intentions: we may not be in hell yet, but we are certainly at about the third stage of purgatory. We have a system which has encouraged specialist law firms to form, to make sure that parents can get the help that they are legally entitled to. If that is not a definition of failure, I do not know what is.

Other Ministers have helped to put some sanity into this system. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, probably deserves some credit for making small changes there as much as she could. As a Minister, she did not need to have assistive technology explained to her—the first I had ever come across. We must have a saner approach to how we deal with this. The idea that you have a £6,000 budget for every child with special educational needs to come out of a school is a fiction. It just does not happen, because that £6,000 is taken away from the school and every other pupil. It would be infinitely saner to start investing some of that fictional spend on specialism and better awareness within the school. You will take the pressure off, and many people can be dealt with like that.

Certain things scare local authorities—which are another big factor here; they are at war. How many years ago did we break the £100 million barrier, with local authorities contesting EHC plans and then losing 90% of the time? It is ridiculous. Can we do something so that the schools are better placed to handle this? Many more people can be helped in the school by a proper, trained person—and be given some actual incentive to do so. The system is frightened of itself. The lawyers come in, and the articulate and informed parents get the help that they need—but those who are not articulate and informed do not. We have to change that.

I realise that I am running out of time. Can we also have certain other things that are needed, such as flexibility? Dyslexia is only one condition. Systematic synthetic phonics is a great phonic tradition for learning to read, but it overloads the short-term memory of dyslexics and other people who have problems reading. The best defence I ever heard from a civil servant on that approach was, “Well, some dyslexics learn with it”. Oh, so some do not? Can we bring back a system where flexibility is taken a must-have when dealing with special educational needs? If we get only more central guidance on how the whole school should conduct itself, we will have more failure. I plead with the Minister to take on board the fact that she will have to address things by individual need not by diktat.