Special Educational Needs: Dyscalculia

Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green (CB)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, for securing this debate and for her relentless efforts to raise awareness and understanding of this most overlooked of subjects. I share some of the difficulties in pronouncing it, but I will do my best: dyscalculia. I refer to my register of interests and declare that my King’s College intern, PhD student George Kinkead, a maths teacher for over a decade, has told me about his experiences and what might help. I reflect his views in this contribution.

When considering this debate, I was shocked to discover that despite dyscalculia being as common as dyslexia, dyslexia is 100 times more likely to be diagnosed. I am dyslexic and I was lucky—I went into a small room with a lovely woman who tried to teach me to juggle. We did things differently in Wales. I remember the matter-of-fact way it was established that my reading up and down a page rather than across, my difficulty following a sequence of instructions, and my ongoing need to hold my left hand up in an L-shape to establish which was the left side, simply indicated that I worked in a particular way.

My love of stories broadened my vocabulary, so the apparent problem I have with simple word recognition was alleviated. Old English posed some challenges in my first year as an undergraduate, but I suspect they were exacerbated by the access to a subsidised bar that came into my life at the same time.

My point is that a diagnosis of dyslexia was helpful. It helped me, my teachers and my parents alter our approach to my learning, and it meant I did not lose my confidence when I took a different route to get to the same place as my peers. I suspect that the lack of stigma around dyslexia that perhaps existed for my generation has led to some of the creative solutions we have seen to it. My computer is well equipped with different packages that enable me to type and read in a different way. I have had acetates to lay over things since I was quite young. The same innovation has not happened around dyscalculia.

It is clear from what we have heard so far in this debate that the woefully inadequate diagnosis of dyscalculia is exacerbating the lifelong exclusion that children can experience if their challenges are simply dismissed as ineptitude. My clever PhD student, George, explained to me that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, said, maths is hierarchical. Unlike other subjects, each topic builds on foundational skills. Missing even a short period of instruction can prevent future learning. If one finds long division in primary school utterly baffling, the quadratic equations that come in year 8 will be a complete mystery: failure builds on failure. A simple diagnosis and a shift in approach as a result can help children. Instead, as we have heard, children feel incapable, tell themselves that they are useless and are ruled out of careers because of it.

The pressure on teachers is immense and requests for additional training seem never-ending. But it seems that even a most cursory introduction to dyscalculia would be of benefit to pupils and teachers, support early diagnosis, and help to restore confidence to those pupils who are ruling themselves out at a young age. In 10 years as a maths teacher, George has never received any statutory training on dyscalculia.

It is also clear that the transition from primary school to secondary school creates another risk for pupils. Research conducted by Glencross and Wallen in their 2020 study on transitions from primary school to secondary school found that informal personal knowledge about individual learning support is often lost, which can be especially challenging for students with neurodiverse conditions.

I wonder whether an opportunity is presented by the proposed introduction of the single unique identifier in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. The Government are rightly taking care to think about what data about children should be saved and shared, and it is perhaps possible that sharing information about neurodiversity, including dyscalculia, can help schools support children to keep working through those mathematical hierarchies even if they change schools.

I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, achieves her aim of ensuring that dyscalculia becomes a government priority. It has historically been a low-profile issue that is perhaps now slightly higher profile as a result of her efforts and this debate. But it is clear that some simple arrangements can make a significant difference to young people in this country.