Lord Addington (LD)

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, for that compliment. We go back to special educational needs here, with a series of amendments in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Holmes and Lord Carlile, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. My amendment is the most general of them, on a general duty to have a look at special educational needs. Some of the specifics in the other amendments probably should be included in that general duty. On teacher training, unless you have teachers who are increasingly better equipped to spot conditions and deal with them in the classroom, you are always going to fail because you will have late diagnosis—or no diagnosis for many conditions—or the wrong practice. I am trying to convince people here that getting extra help for special educational needs may be a bad thing if that help is from the system by which you have already failed. If you do not know what is required and are being told “You’ve already failed to do this”—English would be a classic one—you will just not pass. My experience with dyslexia, which I have mentioned once today, is of being given an extra 15 spelling tests, one every week. You fail them all; you carry on doing it, but you just will not pass. This is because having special educational needs usually means that you process information differently. There can be extreme cases. I have already referred to the noble Lord, Lord Holmes—nobody expects somebody who is blind to copy off a blackboard. You would describe what it is. You have got to have a different system of working and different structures that go with it. I could expand upon this for ages, but the hour is late and other noble Lords with more detailed amendments are waiting to speak. I beg leave to move my amendment and look forward to the rest of this debate.