Dyslexia

Sharon Hodgson Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Weir. I fear that the vote in the House has caused disruption for many people who intended to be in this debate, but what we lack in quantity we will make up for between us in quality.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) for securing this timely debate. As he said, I was at the meeting of the all-party group on dyslexia and specific learning difficulties at which he resolved to apply for this debate. His success in doing so gives us a great opportunity to take forward the discussion we were having in that meeting, along with the hon. Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset (Mr Liddell-Grainger), the noble Lords Addington and Clement-Jones and representatives from the main dyslexia organisations. We will continue that debate here today, and I hope we will receive responses from the Minister to some of our concerns.

I want to record my thanks to the Dyslexia-SpLD Trust, Dyslexia Action, the British Dyslexia Association and Patoss for not just the excellent briefings they provided in advance of the debate but for the work they do day in and day out to unlock the world of words for dyslexic people, particularly children and young adults. My hon. Friend the Member for Luton North gave an excellent speech, which drew on the many concerns that those organisations have raised with us about the current direction of travel in the education system—concerns shared by anyone with an interest in helping young people with special educational needs get the most from life.

My hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) commented on the thinking that dyslexia, rather than being a disability, is to do with a very wide reading ability spectrum, along which most of society would fall. He knows that I disagree with him on that point. There is a huge amount of evidence that proves that dyslexia is a very real and significant disability, especially at the extreme end of the spectrum where it goes way beyond a problem with learning to read and affects memory and organisational ability.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I am sure that we have all come across friends and relatives who have slight spelling disabilities, particularly with unusual names and foreign words. At that end of the spectrum, we are not talking about an inability to read. I am sure that my hon. Friend agrees that there is a difference between those of us who fairly quickly pick up names and foreign words and those who do not, and that is, I believe, the thin end of the dyslexia wedge.

[Mrs Hodgson]

I agree. My son is severely dyslexic, and it affects not just his spelling and writing capability. Dyslexics are often much slower in learning to speak, and when my son was younger the condition affected his speech. He was three before he first said a word that was understandable to others—I could understand his grunts and moans a bit earlier. He has very bad memory problems and organisational ability; dyslexia really does affect a large part of his life. My daughter has been a bad speller most of her life—she is 16 now and her spelling is getting a bit better—but in no way would I say that she has dyslexia as I know it. They do say, however, that the condition runs in families, so she might fall somewhere on the spectrum if she was ever tested.

[Graham Stringer]

I follow the people who do not take my hon. Friend’s view, such as Diane McGuiness and other academics who gave evidence to the Science and Technology Committee, but I was not trying to make the point that there is no complete scientific agreement that dyslexia exists. I was saying that having carefully considered the definition and how it was applied, the Committee came to the conclusion, which I will repeat, that the

“definition is so broad and blurred at the edges that it is difficult to see how it could be useful in any diagnostic sense.”

The Committee was concerned that because of the use of the term, people who had difficulties learning to read and who were not diagnosed were being discriminated against.

[Mrs Hodgson]

Obviously, I am not an expert in the diagnosis of dyslexia, but there are people who are, and when they do the various tests what comes out is something called a spiky chart. Where there is a huge disparity between performance in non-verbal reasoning and other tests of intelligence on the one hand and reading and writing ability on the other, it becomes very obvious that someone is dyslexic. If someone has not very good reading skills but equally does not have high levels of intelligence, they have a flatter profile. Perhaps at the lower edge of the spectrum, as my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North has said—this is getting into a very technical conversation—diagnosis might be difficult and there might be blurred edges, but as we progress along the spectrum I do not think that the edges are blurred. Again, however, I am not an expert.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

My hon. Friend touched on dyslexia being an inherited characteristic, and I am sure that we all know families in which a parent is dyslexic and one or more of their children is. Two male friends of mine who are graduates have three children each, and dyslexia has affected only one child in each family, with that child having a serious spelling disability. All six children went to university and graduated.

[Mrs Hodgson]

The chair of our all-party group, the hon. Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset, is dyslexic, and I believe that his two sons are also. Yes, it is a trait that runs in families, and that is recognised.

Most Members here today know of my personal interest in this issue, as a mother of a severely dyslexic son. My son was unfortunately not diagnosed or helped anywhere near soon enough. The Minister also knows very well most of the concerns that have been raised today, because we have already had debates on the matter and have been in correspondence recently. I thank her for her comprehensive response to my first letter, and I look forward to her response to my reply, which she might preview today.

I wrote that first letter because I had started to see how various changes in education policy could, when taken together, start to put children with certain special educational needs at a disadvantage, and I used dyslexia to illustrate my point because that was the SEN I had personal experience of and knew best—I could see how the changes would have affected my son if he had been coming up to the start of key stage 4 now. I have no doubt that the potential effect is not desired at all by the Minister or her officials, and that it is one of those unintended consequences that we sometimes do not see unless we are looking at something from the outside, or until the effect has begun to manifest itself in statistics.

There are a number of issues on which I will touch briefly. My hon. Friend has mentioned many of them already. It is best in most narratives to start at the beginning, and in this case the beginning is initial teacher training. Without teachers in our classrooms who can spot the signs of dyslexia and teach in a way that does not alienate dyslexic children, we will continue to fail those children. I know from bitter experience that many teachers have a woefully inadequate knowledge of dyslexia. It was not until my son was nine that he came across a teacher who could spot what I now understand were glaringly obvious signs, and even then, that was probably because her own son had dyslexia as well, as I later found out. Too many children in their early years of school life are going through the motions without being noticed and supported. Like other communication difficulties, that can manifest itself in significant problems further down the line such as rebellious behaviour, depression or, as we find in our prisons and young offender institutions, criminality, which often starts as youth disorder.

The answer, in one word, is training. I understand that a module on dyslexia that has the backing of the sector has been prepared and is ready for incorporation in initial teacher training, but the Minister also indicated in her letter to me that the Department has commissioned new materials on specific learning difficulties, which will be available online in the spring. Will those materials form a mandatory part of the initial teacher training course, and will she consider the sector’s calls to incorporate the existing module from 2005 as a minimum requirement? She might be aware that the British Dyslexia Association has an online petition calling for the 2005 module to be used for teacher training; I think the BDA is seeking 100,000 signatures.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

My hon. Friend mentioned people in prison and people with personal difficulties in life. I am sure that she, like me, has come across youngsters with behavioural problems at school that can be traced back to self-esteem problems due to difficulties with spelling, which in their case is dyslexia. That stress can be relieved early on by saying, “You have a condition that we can help you to cope with. It is not something you should be ashamed of or behave badly over; it is something that we can help with and that many other people experience.” If we can convey that to young people, we can probably avoid a lot of the problems in life that many of them suffer.

[Mrs Hodgson]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Early identification is vital. The earlier we can identify all special educational needs, not just dyslexia, the better, but we find that speech, language and communication disorders such as dyslexia often have the biggest effect on children’s self-esteem, and can often lead to problems such as youth disorder further down the line. The number of people in prison with speech, language and communication difficulties and dyslexia is anywhere from 60% to 80%. The noble Lord Ramsbotham is knowledgeable about the issue and speaks about it a lot. Much of the problem could be failure to diagnose special educational needs in our schools. We must ensure that children with a label get the right label, whether it involves dyslexia, behavioural problems, autism or whatever, rather than “naughty”, “lazy” or “disruptive”.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

To refer to my childhood, which was a long time ago, teachers regularly used to beat us on the back of the hand with rulers in those days. I was not beaten, because I was not dyslexic and was good at sums, but lots of my classmates were, simply because they had those sorts of problem.

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[Mrs Hodgson]

That is a world we never want to go back to. Thankfully, that does not happen in our classrooms now, but what happens is that codes of conduct are given out. I saw it with my own son. He did not write down enough work from the board, so he came home with various punishments. The code of conduct was writing out the school rules. I got off the train from London one evening and walked into the house at 11 o’clock to find him still at the kitchen table writing out his punishment, the school rules. The punishment was given because the teacher thought he had not done enough work.

My son was 14 and had started at a new secondary school when we moved. I insisted that all the teachers at least knew that he was dyslexic. I was not asking for special treatment, just that they knew he was severely dyslexic and was statemented. I was assured that they would all be told. As I walked in and saw the punishment, I thought, “Either this is a very evil teacher, or he doesn’t realise my son is severely dyslexic.” I wrote a note to the teacher saying, “This is as far as my son got. I am stopping this punishment now. He is not going to do any more of these punishments. They must be proportionate to his ability.” It was like a child who came last in a sprint being forced to run a marathon. That was the equivalent of the punishment that he had been given.

A note came back the next day: “Very sorry, Mrs Hodgson, we had no idea your child was dyslexic.” That was unbelievable on many levels. The school was supposed to have told all his teachers that he had dyslexia, and it was obvious to anybody who knows anything about the condition that my son is dyslexic. That had not been picked up in him—a child in a new school. What if he had not been diagnosed in a previous school? At any stage in a child’s journey through school, teachers should be able to diagnose such disorders.

I know that we have plenty of time, but I will go back to the substance of my speech. The latest issue to present itself is the phonics screening that will now be required during children’s first years at school. I was more than a little annoyed to see in a departmental press release over the weekend that the Minister’s colleague, the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), referred to the fact that one in 10 11-year-olds could read no better than a seven-year-old as evidence that his favoured phonics scheme is needed, without mentioning that one in 10 11-year-olds have dyslexia.

Strangely, the same press release did not mention that two thirds of teachers who took part in the pilot disagreed that the check accurately assessed the decoding ability of pupils with special educational needs. That is why there are so many concerns about complete reliance on phonics as both a measure of ability and a teaching method. It is also crucial that children who fail the phonics test, as a dyslexic child almost certainly will, are not made to feel as though they have failed—although the test can be good, from the point of view that it identifies them. Appropriate remedial action, including testing for dyslexia, should be taken in a timely manner.

That brings me to the Government’s plans for the future of SEN provision, and the ability of those who will be expected to deliver it to do so. The Minister knows that I welcomed the Green Paper as a means of opening debate on SEN provision, and that I look forward to seeing the results of the consultation, as I know we all do. However, the concern throughout the sector is that young people with non-medical problems such as dyslexia might not warrant support when school action and school action plus are abolished, as very few dyslexic children are currently statemented. I sincerely hope that that will not be the case. I will welcome any assurance that the Minister can give us.

We then come to how support will be provided if a dyslexic pupil is deemed to need it. Local authority budgets are being stretched to breaking point right now. The proliferation of the academies and free schools desired by the Secretary of State will mean that few funds will be held centrally with which to sustain shared support services. I know that I have asked the Minister this before, but I hope that she will guarantee today that support for dyslexic students will not get worse before it gets better due to the austerity programme being imposed on local authorities, and that when the new system is fully up and running, the money will be there to back it.

I move to the end of students’ time in school. The Minister will know that I have concerns about the key stage 4 curriculum and examinations. I will not labour the point about the E-bac, but needless to say, it has been installed as the gold standard set of qualifications, despite the fact that it will exclude almost all young people with dyslexia, as they are usually not taught foreign languages, whether modern or ancient, for obvious reasons. On assessment, Ofqual confirmed in a press release today that it is implementing the changes to GCSEs that the Government told it to make—scrapping modular examinations, which allow students to break up their learning into more manageable chunks and sit exams as they go along, when the subject is fresh in their minds. Instead, from next year students will be required to learn for two years—a bit like when we sat our O-levels—and commit all of that learning to paper in one go. That intensity will pose a challenge for many children with SEN, but especially dyslexics, given the memory problems I mentioned.

The support that young people with dyslexia need to be able even to sit their exams, let alone do well in them, is also under threat. The Minister will, I hope, have seen my latest letter to her in which I drew her attention to an article by Jack Grimston in The Sunday Times on 20 November. He reports the concerns that school teachers have over the changes that the Joint Council for Qualifications has made to eligibility for access arrangements in examinations, which my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North highlighted.

The changes will prevent bright pupils with dyslexia from getting extra time or a reader and a scribe in exams to mitigate their limited reading and writing abilities, which gives them a level playing field with their non-dyslexic peers. That will have a detrimental effect on the qualifications that they will be able to achieve. There are many bright pupils with dyslexia, as we have heard today, some of whom go on to doctorates in physics. They say that Einstein was dyslexic, and I could list many other examples.

In a timed exam, the most intelligent young person is only ever as good as their ability to read the questions set and transfer the answers from their minds to the paper, which is why the most severely dyslexic pupil is given a reader and a scribe. In making the changes, the JCQ is limiting what intelligent dyslexics can achieve, and from my conversations with the sector, it appears to have done so without any consultation. I urge the Minister to look into the matter and intervene where necessary to ensure that such young people are not held back by their disability.

Finally, I understand from today’s Ofqual announcement that once the exams have been sat, dyslexics will be at a disadvantage yet again during marking, because the proportion of marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in certain subjects is being increased following interventions from the Secretary of State. Even if a dyslexic pupil gets a reader and a scribe, whose spelling is the examiner marking?

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I am sorry to intervene once again on my hon. Friend’s excellent speech. The points she raises suggest that dyslexic pupils should be identified and the fact that a pupil is dyslexic recorded on the examination paper, so that allowances are made. I heard only today of a young woman who is highly intelligent in conversation and can come top of her class in most things, but has difficulty with writing due to her dyslexia. Every time she is tested orally, she does brilliantly, but when she is tested in writing, she has more difficulty.

[Mrs Hodgson]

I hope that the Minister will take up those other concerns with the JCQ and that compensations can be made in marking. We do not ask for favourable treatment for dyslexics, but for their disability to be recognised and accommodations made, so that there is a level playing field.

I have not set out to make political points today because the debate has been well informed and constructive, and I know that supporting young people with dyslexia is important to Members on both sides of both Houses. I sincerely hope that the Minister will commit to returning with her officials to look at the specific concerns raised today, and that she will take any necessary steps to mitigate, or indeed undo, the impact of what are the, I hope, unintended consequences that the various reforms and changes may have on the education and life chances of the estimated 750,000 young people in our schools and colleges who have dyslexia.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

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[Penny Mordaunt]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Getting an assessment to start with is a battle for parents, and then they must have confidence in it and in the remedial action that should be taken. Many parents I have been dealing with have not had satisfaction on any of those fronts.

I would be grateful if the Minister could say more about the statutory responsibilities of the Department for Education and the discussions she may have had with the Department of Health. We need to strengthen the tools available to parents and other advocates for these children. My constituents certainly believe that they pay their taxes to ensure that the education system we provide gives every child the education they need to reach their full potential.

One of my final points relates to costs. Where we have not been able to get a school place for some of the children in my constituency, we have actually funded placements for them, and I should like to place on record my thanks to a number of London livery companies and local Rotarians for providing funds to allow that to happen. In just one year, the girl I mentioned at the start, who was four years behind her expected reading age, has caught up. She is a bright girl, and having been given the proper, full-time dyslexia teaching that she needed, she is now doing really well.

An argument that is often thrown back at us is that providing all the top-notch SEN provision that children need costs too much and that the state cannot possibly afford it, but that is a bit of a myth. The placement that we have funded for the child I mentioned cost less than the provision that the local authority would have had to put in place in the school that it chose for her. It is possible to do these things, and they will often save the state money not only initially, but, as has been mentioned, in the long term, given all the problems and issues that people have if they do not get the help that they need.

[Mrs Hodgson]

The hon. Lady is making some important points, and she makes a good point about spending money wisely. Research has been done—I do not have it in front of me, but that is not necessary to make my point—showing that an hour with a specialist dyslexia teacher is worth more than 50 hours with a well-meaning teaching assistant who is not able to give the specific support that a child needs. I might have the ratio wrong, but it is in that realm.

[Penny Mordaunt]

That is absolutely right.

To carry on using the example of the girl I mentioned—I have said this to the Minister before—the problem was not so much that the local authority could not be bothered to find her a suitable place as that the restrictions on how it could use its funding meant that it could not fund some of the obvious solutions. Will the Minister therefore say something about how she might reform the rules governing how local authorities and schools can spend particular pots of money, to ensure that we use that money in the best and most sensible way to meet people’s educational needs, whether they have dyslexia, a pragmatic language disorder or autism? We must ensure that we get every child who needs this provision the help that they need.

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[Sarah Teather]

One thing that we suggested in the Green Paper was speeding up the process, but this is also a question of trying to make clear what the thresholds should be, and I will say a little more about that later.

The other thing that informed the Government’s work on the Green Paper was Ofsted’s report, which showed that too many children are being over-identified as having SEN. In other words, the wrong children are often labelled as having SEN, and we need to ensure that we put in place the right support for children at the right time.

At the heart of the Government’s vision for the reforms is a desire to support better life outcomes for young people, to increase parents’ confidence in the system and to transfer powers to the front line and local communities, as we are trying to do across all areas of policy. To achieve those changes, we are introducing a new approach to identifying SEN to challenge the culture of low expectations. There will be a new, single early-years setting and school-based category of SEN.

I heard the concerns of the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West, who was worried that it might lead to some young people not getting the support they need, but I should stress that, of course, school action at the moment brings with it no extra funds. School action plus money is provided to schools on the basis of other proxy indicators, rather than the number of children actually in the relevant category in previous years, so it should make no difference to the resources that are allocated. However, it will make it easier for schools to decide how to deal with the young people that they focus on. Many of them say that the existing categories are somewhat bureaucratic. Ofsted has made the point that some children are labelled as having special education needs when really they are just falling behind. That is a rather different debate from the one about specific learning difficulties.

[Mrs Hodgson]

We are looking for reassurance that when the reason for children falling behind is an underlying special educational need, rather than there being no specific reason, they will still be identified by some marker. They might not need the education, health and care plan, and all that it brings, but the marker would have been school action or school action plus. Will there still be some mechanism to identify those children?

I suppose the reason for giving the relevant marker to children who fall behind might be to try to find out whether there is an underlying reason.

[Sarah Teather]

When Ofsted reported, a rather heated debate took place between teaching unions and Ofsted, and it shed a lot of heat but not light. Many accusations were thrown from both sides about motives. I do not think that teachers label a child as having special educational needs to get round league tables or for similar reasons. It is human nature, when a problem is seen, to label it. Unfortunately, that labelling was often not followed by action. It is all very well to label a child, but it is purposeless to do so if no action follows. The child then carries a label with them, irrespective of whether it is helpful, and does not get the support needed to enable them to progress. We are trying to get away from the focus on labelling, and instead to adopt an approach in which those concerned look at the child in front of them, and ask what they need. Some of that approach, to be fair, is about good teaching practice, which will deal with many needs.

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[Sarah Teather]

I cannot comment on a specific case, but perhaps if the hon. Lady drops me a note about the matter, I will have a look at it. In the Green Paper, we indicated that local authorities need to provide support to families who are home schooling a child. They are often doing so because they have been unable to get the support that they need in mainstream settings or perhaps because their local special school did not provide them with the support that they wanted.

I want to say something about Achievement for All because it goes to the heart of some of the issues that we have been discussing about the need for someone to look at the child in front of them and have high aspirations, rather than necessarily think about the labels. The Achievement for All programme has been running in around 450 schools for the past two years, and the evaluation has demonstrated some dramatic results. Under the programme, children made greater progress in English and mathematics than other children with SEND across the country, and they also often exceeded the progress of children without SEND, so there has been a really dramatic improvement.

The independent evaluation, which was carried out by the university of Manchester, demonstrated that pupil attendance significantly improved. That picks up some of the other points that we were discussing a moment ago about additional needs sometimes being confused with SEN. Often the issue is just about getting young people to attend school. For children taking part in the Achievement for All programme, there was an average increase in attendance of just over 10%. The evaluation also found significant improvements in behaviour, including less bullying, stronger relationships between schools and parents and a greater awareness and focus on SEND.

Some of the points that the hon. Member for Portsmouth North discussed in relation to her Bill—parental engagement and the need to communicate better with parents—go partly at the heart of this. One of the key facets of the Achievement for All programme is parental engagement and enabling teachers to feel confident about having a conversation with parents about the progress of their child. The Government are investing £14 million to roll out the programme across the country, so that more children can benefit. The programme is being delivered by a newly formed charity, Achievement for All 3As, chaired by Brian Lamb and supported by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Schools can now see for themselves the evidence that the programme works, and we want more schools to come forward and sign up.

The evaluation highlighted some important lessons in how to improve the outcomes for pupils with SEND. Perhaps most crucially, there needs to be strong leadership from the head teacher and senior leadership team, rather than simply relying on a SENCO to provide leadership within a school, although that is important. Achievement for All 3As is currently engaged with 41 local authorities and 598 schools. We hope and estimate that, overall, 1,000 schools will have signed up to the programme by April next year.

I want to turn to some of the specific concerns, particularly on the Joint Council for Qualifications guidance, expressed by hon. Members. I understand that there has been significant concern following recent coverage about apparent changes to the availability of reasonable adjustments for dyslexic pupils. It is, of course, absolutely vital for the fairness of an exam system that reasonable adjustments are made where needed. We have therefore been in touch with the JCQ about the changes, and it maintains that there has been no change to the circumstances in which a student is entitled to extra time for an exam. What has changed is the type of evidence that is acceptable to demonstrate that such extra time is needed.

The most recent edition of the relevant guidance confirms that a school or college must consider and maintain on record the evidence that the student has been assessed as having a below-average standardised score in an assessment of processing, reading or writing speed. I emphasise that the previous guidance similarly required evidence of low standardised scores using assessments of processing speed, reading or writing. I am afraid that we are picking up differences in practice, not differences in the guidance. Such difficulties have always been the basis on which extra time can be awarded to dyslexic pupils, and difficulties in phonological awareness—understanding and decoding the sounds of words and verbal processing—were two of the characteristics of dyslexia identified by Sir Jim Rose.

I understand that Dyslexia Action has written directly to the JCQ to set out its concerns. It is right that the JCQ and Ofqual, as the independent body overseeing the examinations system, should respond to those and determine whether any further clarification of the arrangements is required. I understand that they will be meeting with dyslexia charities and experts in the new year to explore those differences further. Ofqual has assured me that pupils already granted extra time will remain entitled to it on the basis of their existing assessment. I hope that hon. Members will be reassured on that point.

[Mrs Hodgson]

On a point of clarity about the difference between the old and the new criteria, is it the case that, under the old criteria, students had to have a low score and that now it has to be below average? I am not sure whether I heard the Minister correctly.

[Sarah Teather]

There is no change in the criteria; there is a change in the evidence that has to be provided. What we are picking up on is how schools interpreted the previous guidance, not necessarily the actual guidance that was being provided. That raises some issues about how schools were interpreting the guidance and the freedom that they thought that it gave them. In fact, the guidance is the same, but slightly more rigorous evidence is being asked for to demonstrate that schools have met the guidance, and they are being asked to hold that on record. The best thing is for Ofqual and the JCQ to meet dyslexia charities in the new year, as they will do, along with other experts in the area. They should make those points to the JCQ and Ofqual at that stage.

The hon. Lady spoke briefly about the changes to spelling, punctuation and grammar in some GCSEs that were announced this afternoon. Hon. Members may be aware that that was likely to happen and that we would be restoring marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in some key subjects that have extended pieces of writing. During Ofqual’s consultation on the proposals, it heard concerns from dyslexia organisations about the potential impact on pupils with special educational needs, particularly dyslexia. I understand that it will be considering that as it decides how to roll out and implement the proposal.

However, during the consultation, there was also widespread support for ensuring accuracy within the qualifications. People expect those with high grades in GCSEs to be able to write accurately. The need to include an assessment of accuracy in spelling, punctuation and grammar is key to restoring confidence in GCSEs as rigorous and valued qualifications. Ofqual has set the level at 5% of total marks for the GCSE, so that the assessment of subject knowledge is not affected disproportionately. There will be the possibility of partial marks. It is not an all-or-nothing assessment and students will be able to achieve some or all of the marks depending on the extent of accuracy and how well they have conveyed meaning. In practice, there will be no blanket effect on the grades achieved by individuals, and the credibility of the exam and the grades achieved will be increased for all. Such changes, alongside some of the reforms to special educational needs provision, will give a real incentive to teach all pupils those core skills and prevent pupils with special educational needs from being sidelined or aspirations being lowered.

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[Sarah Teather]

If we are to have a society that is less divided, we must ensure that all children, regardless of their background, are given the same benefits of that sound education. Putting those marks, even 5%, back into qualifications will create an incentive to ensure that all children have that grounding. That is really important.

[Mrs Hodgson]

To return to the subject of dyslexia and the dispensation that will be given for children with dyslexia, the additional 5% can make the difference between an A and an A* for a very bright, dyslexic pupil.

[Sarah Teather]

Ofqual will consider and take into account the concerns of dyslexic charities when it decides on implementation. The issue of reasonable adjustments continues to remain.

I should like to conclude now. I thought that we would not have many speakers. In fact, I seem to have prattled on for so long—[Interruption.] Are there 17 minutes left? I thought that we finished at 3.45 pm. I have been racing to the end and thought that I only had two minutes. In fact, we have loads of time. I might still conclude anyway, or I will not have any voice left.

I am very grateful to hon. Members for their contributions. I hope that I have been able to allay some concerns. Dyslexia charities will no doubt make the points that they made to the hon. Members who came to this debate to Ofqual and JCQ in the new year, but I want to leave hon. Members with the assurance that we are absolutely committed to reforming the support for children with special educational needs and disability. We will say much more in the new year, in response to the consultation. I am grateful to all hon. Members for their constructive input on this matter.