Special Educational Needs: Dyscalculia

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, on securing this debate. I also thank her for educating us. I have to confess that I had never heard of dyscalculia before preparing for tonight’s debate. If the excellent briefings produced by our Library and the Dyscalculia Network are anything to go by, I am in good company.

I relate to the issue on two levels, both personal. First, as a disabled pupil today, I would probably be assessed for SEN support. As a child in the 1970s and 1980s, such provision was not available, at least not to my knowledge. What was not so much available as expected was that all disabled children should be sent to special schools and segregated. I mean no criticism of special schools, but I will always remember my mother, who spent a lifetime in teaching, being horrified when the headmaster of one special school boasted that, the year before, a pupil had achieved one CSE.

My limited time at that special school, when I had to use a wheelchair full-time following yet another fracture, made an indelible impression on me. Even as a 10 year-old, I was aware of the low expectations. It was just assumed that disability was synonymous with underachievement. Indeed, the title of the noble Baroness’s article on PoliticsHome of March this year,

“Dyscalculic children have been let down for too long”,

could so easily have been applied to children with disabilities generally. They were let down by the system. Helping children with SEN realise their potential simply did not come into the equation.

I like to think that the damaging culture of low aspiration which informed such attitudes then is being challenged by teachers and SEN co-ordinators now. I want to put on record my recognition that they do incredibly important work, and I take this opportunity to thank them for responding to what, at the end of the day—and I know from my parents that a day in the classroom is often long and always demanding—has to be a vocation. Ultimately, a good teacher answers a vocation to help shape a child’s future and instil in them a belief that they can make a worthwhile contribution to life, especially beyond school.

Secondly, I relate to the issue as someone who got an A in Latin O-level and a C—just—in maths. Indeed, my maths teacher had so much confidence in my innate ability with figures that he decided he would enter me for both O-level and CSE. I scraped a pass in both, but he obviously was not taking any chances. As with the noble Baroness’s nieces, my heart sank when a previous Prime Minister made great play of his plan for all children to be required to study maths beyond GCSE. My own experience—and, I believe, the experience of other noble Lords who have spoken in tonight’s debate—is that, however much we would wish otherwise, our brains are wired differently. Maths is simply not for everyone.

That would appear to be especially the case for children with dyscalculia. As someone who really struggled with anything numerical at school and knows what it is like to have one’s confidence undermined, both because of the unkind taunts that go with the territory of living with a disability and, specifically, because of finding maths so challenging, I hate to think of how much the one in 20 children with dyscalculia must suffer, and, worse, how much their suffering is compounded unnecessarily by ignorance.

Of course, teachers and SENCOs are not to blame if they are not aware of dyscalculia, but surely that only underlines the strong case that noble Baroness, Lady Bull, has made for improved support, particularly the call for mandatory training in dyscalculia for teachers. Does the Minister agree that these children need to be taught that dyscalculia is not their fault and that they have potential worth realising? It seems to me—and, I suspect, to other contributors in tonight’s debate—that their life chances depend on it.