Special Educational Needs: Dyscalculia

Baroness Barran Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate, so ably introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Bull. She rightly brings the House’s attention to the important issues of SEND in general and dyscalculia in particular. Maths is of course a vital area for securing economic growth, and I would like to pay tribute to the work done by the Maths Horizons Project, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Tarassenko, on maths education in the age of AI.

Nationally we have seen great progress in recent years in our international rankings for maths, being a top country outside south-east Asia, and with a marked improvement in the last 30 years in the standard pass rate for maths at GCSE to around 80% by the age of 19. But when we turn to the wider issues facing children with special educational needs and disabilities, the situation is much less rosy.

The system we have created to respond to children with SEND is a product of the Children and Families Act 2014. Before the 2014 reforms the SEND system was widely criticised for being fragmented: education, health and social care operated separately in different silos. It was described as bureaucratic and slow, parents suffered lengthy delays, and it was very complicated to get any support. Families felt disempowered and unable to input into decisions that affected their children. As my noble friend Lord Shinkwin said, the system was low in ambition; there was a culture of low expectations.

As we know, the Act introduced education, health and care plans, support to the age of 25, the concept of co-production with families, and the requirement for local authorities to publish comprehensive information about available SEND services. I labour these points for two reasons. The first is that across this House we all know that the system we have today is not working well, but it is a function of these reforms. They look so sensible on paper, yet in practice they have created a set of incentives that ended up pointing in the wrong direction.

I dwell on this also because the Government are currently taking action. We are debating, in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, major reforms to safeguarding systems, and I know they are planning to bring forward further reforms in relation to special educational needs. I think that will be later this year; maybe the Minister can confirm the timing.

Whether in relation to the broader reforms or to specific interventions for dyscalculia, it is important that we test and pilot and really are confident, and that we focus on implementation. The importance of that cannot be overstated. The noble Baroness, Lady Bull, has rightly focused this debate on the resources in schools to identify special educational needs and to support students with a range of needs. She mentioned some of the changes made under the previous Government to the early career framework and the support for early-career teachers. Those were bolstered by an investment in early years SENCOs and a revised practical SENCO qualification.

Some of the problems that we still face go beyond those reforms. I will touch briefly on two areas in particular. First, most of the discretionary funding in the system is available for children with an education, health and care plan, and there is no real incentive for successful early intervention to support children with special educational needs and integrate them into mainstream education without an EHCP. Because of the shortage of places in specialist schools, which my noble friend Lady Coffey mentioned, we need to be able to integrate more effectively and incentivise schools to deliver effective early intervention.

Secondly, there is no equivalent of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence for SEND. I am told repeatedly by school leaders that some of the support suggested for children, including those with dyscalculia, has literally no evidence base to support it—but if it is on the plan they have no choice but to deliver it. All too often we see the least qualified members of staff in a school being allocated to a child with complex needs, when actually that child needs much more specialist support. I would grateful if the Minister could comment on whether that is on the shopping list of things that the Government might consider in their reforms.

In closing, I echo some of the questions that have already been put by other noble Lords. Will the Government consider a formal definition of dyscalculia? Will they respond to the call by the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, to track the incidence of cases and indeed the impact of interventions to support those children? As my noble friend Lord Shinkwin said, this is all about securing opportunity for children—something that, across the House, we can all support.