Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to assist young people diagnosed with dyslexia to improve their writing skills for their A-level exams.

The reforms to the Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) system introduced in 2014 benefit all children and young people who have SEND, including those with dyslexia. Building on 2013-16 funding, the Department for Education is funding the British Dyslexia Association (BDA) and partners in 2017-18, with £500,000 to facilitate better support for children with dyslexia. BDA resources include information on speech recognition software which converts speech to text.

The development of writing skills is already a fundamental part of the school curriculum. To support improvements in areas where standards are currently lower than average, we will be setting up a new Centre of Excellence for Literacy Teaching and a national network of 35 English Hubs.

Exam boards have a duty under the Equality Act 2010 to make reasonable adjustments for disabled students who because of their disability would otherwise be at a substantial disadvantage when demonstrating their skills, knowledge and understanding in an assessment. Such reasonable adjustments may include having extra time, a scribe, reader, overlays, different fonts or size of fonts or the use of word processor. Reasonable adjustments are made for many thousands of students each year. The exam boards use an online system to streamline the process for seeking a reasonable adjustment.