Special Educational Needs: Dyscalculia

Lord Tarassenko Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tarassenko (CB)]

My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lady Bull on securing this debate and making such a strong case for action in just under 10 minutes.

On Monday, we released the final report of the Maths Horizons Project, which I have had the privilege of chairing for the past eight months. This project has taken an in-depth look at the maths curriculum and assessment, with a view to informing the Government’s review chaired by Professor Becky Francis.

The abilities of children in our schools for any characteristic follow a Gaussian distribution, probably better known as a bell curve. In the Maths Horizons Project our aim has been to try to identify strategies that would help not only those in the top two deciles for mathematical ability but those in the bottom two deciles—the bottom 20%—who would have failed to get a grade 4 in maths GCSE even after multiple resits.

Our second recommendation—out of seven—we believe will help both groups. It is:

“Rebalance content from upper primary to lower secondary, allowing more time for knowledge to be secured when it is first introduced”.


Giving more time to teachers to focus on core concepts in early primary school would provide children the opportunity to develop and embed the foundations they need.

The better balance of content between upper primary and lower secondary will also enable high attainers not to become bored and lose interest in maths during key stage 3, as often happens today, when much of the current teaching focuses on revisiting key stage 2 content. The main benefit, however, will be for those children who struggle with mathematics for more general cognitive reasons. Although it is unlikely to be sufficient for children with severe number-processing difficulties—and I have waited that long to introduce dyscalculia—we identified this group as a special group in our Maths Horizons Project.

Three numbers have kept coming up in this debate. With a prevalence of about 5%—the first number—it is likely that there is at least one child with dyscalculia in every class of 30, the second number. Although the prevalence of dyscalculia is similar to that of dyslexia, a child with dyscalculia is 100 times—that is the third number and probably the most shocking—less likely to be diagnosed. But it is encouraging to be able to report some recent progress here. A member of the executive group for the Maths Horizons Project, Professor Camilla Gilmore from Loughborough University, has been part of a working group developing an up-to-date evidence-based dyscalculia diagnosis methodology. This was released in March this year by the SpLD Assessment Standards Committee.

This enables a solution to the issue of diagnosis but does not deliver it as there is a lack of suitable training for dyscalculia assessors. Most current SpLD assessment training courses leading to an approved qualification focus on literacy skills and the identification of dyslexia, with very limited content on mathematics, so I urge the Minister to intervene to ensure that approved qualifications also include the identification of dyscalculia.

Another recommendation of the Maths Horizons Project would increase the likelihood of diagnosis. Our fourth recommendation is to introduce

“low-stakes gateway checks of fundamental knowledge, to be administered nationally at specified points in new knowledge-progression maps”.

A low-stakes gateway check at key stage 1 would allow teachers to identify at an early stage those children who are struggling to grasp foundational concepts in mathematics, meaning that a diagnosis of dyscalculia could be made between the ages of five and seven. Of course, we should acknowledge—as has been pointed out—that problems will persist, even with high-quality specialist intervention following a diagnosis.

When a child with dyscalculia reaches secondary school, the interventional strategies could include apps that run either on a smartphone or a computer tablet, such as an iPad. Earlier, it was my pleasure to meet some people with dyscalculia here in the cafeteria, and some of the young ones told me that they do use apps to help with their dyscalculia. The Maths Horizons Project team was broadly in favour of digital tools for education, provided that these are introduced in the classroom in the right way, at the right time and in a carefully sequenced progression.

If you look on the web, you will see there are plenty of apps to help children with dyscalculia that can be downloaded from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, but only those that are high quality and evidence-based should be used. A simple measure that the Department for Education could take would be to establish a working group to make recommendations that will help parents and teachers identify suitable apps.

As we have heard, we have made huge progress over the last 20 years in diagnosing and supporting children with dyslexia. For a child with dyscalculia to thrive, early identification is also likely to be crucial. Low-stakes gateway checks at key stage 1 would help to spot those in need of an up-to-date assessment. This would require one or two teachers per school to be sent on training courses to gain an approved qualification that focuses on dyscalculia. Simple, low-cost intervention strategies with counters can help children at primary level who have had a diagnosis, before they are supplemented or replaced by evidence-based digital tools at secondary level. It is now time for children with dyscalculia to be given the same opportunities to progress through our education system as children with dyslexia.