Special Educational Needs: Dyscalculia

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. Like everyone here, I thank my noble friend Lady Bull for her strenuous efforts to get this important topic debated and her thought-provoking opening speech.

As ever, I must declare an interest in that I still teach weekly at a state secondary school in Hackney. I am actually a teacher of maths—15% of the design and technology curriculum is maths based—and I have to admit that I did not know much about dyscalculia before researching for this. An irony here is that dyslexia is difficult to spell and dyscalculia is tricky to say. What is it about these learning disabilities that we have to give them such complicated names? I am told it rhymes with Julia, so I have to keep on remembering that.

At school, I talked to the head of SEND and was told that we assess for dyslexia but not dyscalculia. If there are concerns about dyscalculia, which are rarely reported and usually flagged by parents, as opposed to teachers, we usually advise that they self-refer through their GP. In maths, students are placed into sets according to their year 6 CAT scores, and additional support is then given according to need.

But there we have a problem: according to the recent letter from the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee to the Secretary of State for Education, the Government are

“failing to recruit as many maths teachers as it has targeted for over a decade, and almost half of all secondary schools needing to use non-specialist teachers for maths. It is part of a wider shortage in STEM graduates going into teaching (and being retained in the profession)”.

Once you have non-specialist teachers teaching maths, there is inevitably going to be a drop in levels of help for those who struggle most in maths.

The Dyscalculia Network puts it more starkly:

“In recent published data around Prison education 55% of prisoners who lack a maths qualification had a Learning Difficulty confirmed at their initial screening. Once identified, these people often went on to obtain maths qualifications, ranging from Entry Level through to Level 2. They experienced success. The issue is not in Prison education; the problem sits in lack of recognition of maths learning difficulties in previous educational settings”.


I return to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee:

“Our witnesses argued that the rigid focus on obtaining a Grade 4 at GCSE in the current educational system disadvantages many students. There is an argument for the creation of a widely recognised, criterion-based, functional mathematics qualification in the UK that allows school leavers and adult learners alike to demonstrate the numeracy skills needed for life. This could be set up by dividing the GCSE curriculum into functional mathematics, with a practical focus on applying the basics, and more the abstract, pure mathematics required for further study, or through expanding and formalising existing criterion-based numeracy qualifications”.


This is actually what I teach in design technology, both at GCSE and A-level. All the maths problems are based on real-world product design issues: the amount of varnish needed to coat a table, the tessellations of a product to save material or the amount of sheet metal that you would have to order for a production run. This means that even those students who find maths boring or difficult can see how the maths will help them in their design—how different from a student who finds maths difficult or even impossible facing a double GCSE maths lesson on a Monday morning.

The maths curriculum needs to change, I have long argued that children should be taught how to build and populate a calculating spreadsheet in year 6. They would love it and see the point to it, rather than fearing Excel, as most adults do.

The Dyscalculia Network goes on to say:

“All citizens need foundational mathematics skills and general quantitative literacy for daily life, including personal finance and general employment. We need mathematics curricula that set people up for life and tools to support those that struggle”.


By insisting on a rigid maths curriculum, we are failing not only those with dyscalculia and many different types of neurodiversity, but anyone who thinks vaguely differently from the norm.