Support for Dyslexic Pupils

Charlotte Cane Excerpts

Tuesday 11th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Charlotte Cane (Ely and East Cambridgeshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Adam Dance) and the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Juliet Campbell) on securing this debate. I thank them for their excellent speeches, and I echo their calls for a national dyslexia strategy.

Within six weeks of starting primary school, pupils are tested on their literacy, communication and maths ability, and they are pushed to meet the expected standard in phonics by the end of year 1. Those who fail are pushed in year 2 and re-tested at the end of that year. This pressure, and thoughtless comments by staff or pupils, can make a dyslexic child feel stupid or thick because they struggle to read and write, but they are not; they are different.

My constituent Neil contacted me earlier this year about improving SEND provision, giving the example of his dyslexic 15-year-old daughter, Lucy. He told me that Lucy will leave school with,

“low self-esteem and low expectations, because the world will judge her based on her grades. She will assume that there are just things that are not within her capability.”

That is shocking. Our education system must do better than that. If a child is not diagnosed at an early stage, support is not put in place and students struggle further—albeit we know from Lucy’s experience that even pupils who have been diagnosed with dyslexia do not always get the support they need. They then go on to sit their exams, often remaining undiagnosed, and as we have heard, only one in five dyslexic pupils achieves grade 5 or above in English and maths. As they move into sixth form, they are then further impeded in their sixth form studies because they have to resit English and/or maths.

Neil told me this morning that Lucy is sitting two mock exams today, and that she was extremely distressed at the mere thought of going through such a stressful process. I am sure colleagues will join me in wishing Lucy the best of luck today, and in all her exams. Does the Minister agree that more should be done to give dyslexic pupils a fair chance in the assessment process? Will she update us on the steps the Government will take to improve reasonable adjustments for pupils in exams? If we make early diagnosis the norm, we will not only give children more support in the classroom but boost their educational attainment.

Teachers too need support to be able to spot the signs of dyslexia from an early stage, and to support dyslexic pupils in their classroom. Neil told me that his wife spends a lot of time emailing Lucy’s teachers to give them constructive feedback on how a dyslexic student learns. No parent should be expected to bear that additional burden, nor should teachers for that matter. What will the Government do to support teachers and better equip them to support dyslexic pupils? I discovered that the Government do not publish data on levels of dyslexia among school-age children, so we do not actually know the full scale of the problem. Will the Minister commit today to exploring this option further?

We have heard that many dyslexic people lead successful lives—famously, Richard Branson, Jamie Oliver and Zoë Wanamaker, to name but three—but too many do not. Somewhere between three and five in 10 prisoners have dyslexia, compared with one in 10 in the population as a whole. We see from the many entrepreneurs and brilliant artists that dyslexic people have valuable skills to share. We need an education system that identifies dyslexic pupils early and supports their learning, so that they all have the chance to succeed in life.