Contribution
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 183B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Cash. I am grateful to her for a probing amendment that allows us to think in particular about school readiness. We have already heard about the well-evidenced links between poor school readiness and academic career and lifetime outcomes. Recent research, including from the Centre for Young Lives, has made the link between long-term absenteeism and school disengagement.
I want to think about what school readiness means in the case of neurodiverse children, particularly those with a specific congenital biological learning difficulty, such as dyslexia or dyscalculia. I will highlight four important points that we know about these conditions. First, you are born with them and you will live with them throughout life. Secondly, without identification and support, dyscalculics and dyslexics are likely to suffer long-term impacts to their education, career and health outcomes. Thirdly, with identification and the right support, dyscalculic and dyslexic children can absolutely thrive in school and in future careers because neither condition is a sign of low intelligence or low intellectual ability. Finally, I point to the crucial importance of early intervention in improving outcomes.
If you take those four points together, they present a compelling case for considering the identification of specific learning difficulties as a key component of school readiness. Children with specific learning difficulties will need specific support and, if they get it from day 1, the outcomes for them will be so much better. It is really hard to see how we can deem a child ready to learn if we have not identified a specific learning difficulty and put in place the adjustments that are necessary to meet those needs. So it is not just about securing the foundations for their future learning and giving all children an equal chance to thrive; it is also about obviating any risk that they will be mistakenly judged as stupid, lazy or not trying, all of which have serious impacts on self-esteem, confidence and mental health.
So I very much support the noble Baroness’s amendment, but I would like to see it further strengthened by including a requirement to screen for dyscalculia and dyslexia at the beginning of the educational journey. At the very least, screening for dyscalculia should be included alongside the reading assessments that are already undertaken at key stage 1. My noble friend Lord Tarassenko has suggested that such screening could be made available in every school simply by training two teachers to undertake the testing. Yes, of course there would be a cost involved, but it is a very small price to pay when we think about the long-term economic impacts and the cost to individuals of living and working with an undiagnosed and unsupported learning difficulty. Some 17 years ago, it was estimated that dyslexia can reduce lifetime earnings by £81,000. For dyscalculia, that was £114,000. Goodness knows what those figures would be today—they are 17 years out of date—and we should not forget the cost to the economy of low numeracy, which is currently £25 billion a year.
My noble friend Lord Addington—I like to call him my noble friend—will agree that it is very good news that the sustained focus on literacy and reading scores, and greater awareness, have made it more likely that dyslexic children will be identified. But, for children with dyscalculia, it could be years before an enlightened teacher spots that they are not stupid or lazy but just have a learning difficulty of which most people have never heard. I heard today about a 600-strong school in which there are apparently no known incidences of dyscalculia. The UK prevalence rate is between 6% and 10%, so that just cannot be—