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Debate on the Address

My Lords, I return to the subject of education and confine myself to a few points on that aspect of the gracious Speech. I congratulate the Government on undertaking to provide new rights for adults to acquire skills and training, a subject on which many of your Lordships feel strongly. However, the proposal on keeping young people in education or training until they are 18—the only other specific undertaking in the gracious Speech—seems more dubious. I share the anxieties that were powerfully expressed earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Pilkington. It seems to me that the Government are starting at the wrong end. In his opening speech the Minister said that there would be no compulsion except in the case of young people who did not recognise the benefits of participation in the scheme. I am certain that there will be many such young people, for the good reason that they have come through their entire time in the school system unable to read or spell or perhaps to perform the simplest calculation. After all, even for vocational education you need to be able to read. Some of the non-participants may already be in prison, where their chances of education are pitiably low in any case. Many of these young people have the disability, of varying severity, broadly known as dyslexia. Here I must declare an interest as president of the British Dyslexia Association. The truth about dyslexia is that it is a specific learning difficulty that can be identified in the first year at primary school, and the probability of dyslexia can be identified even before then, in the reception class. It is also known that early intervention is both possible and essential if the child suffering from it is to acquire the strategies needed to overcome his disability. But it is also known that teaching these strategies is a job for teachers with specific training in teaching dyslexic children—and, with much more difficulty, teaching dyslexic adults. Severely dyslexic children are often very bright and competent. If properly taught, they can excel academically. They can be taught how to read music and may do very well at it; the same goes for mathematics. But left without specialist teaching, they will never fulfil their potential, an aspiration unsurprisingly mentioned in the gracious Speech. As well as, or indeed perhaps instead of, concentrating on young people who have already failed, the Government ought to give an undertaking that, by 2012, every child should have access from the very beginning of their education to a specialist teacher if that is needed. This is a matter of the greatest importance and urgency. This means that every teacher should be trained in the course of their initial teacher training to identify the signs of dyslexia. However, many of us have experience of how difficult it is to persuade those responsible for initial teacher training to add new components to the curriculum. However, that is vital. If a child has been identified as at risk of developing dyslexia, or as already dyslexic, he can be handed over to a specialist to be taught for at least one hour a week, and a specialist is what is needed. It is literally worse than useless for an untrained classroom assistant to try to help a dyslexic child who is in difficulties. It may do more harm than good. Many schools now claim that they are ““supporting”” a child who has difficulties simply on the grounds that he has access to a classroom assistant. That is not enough and may make things worse as the years go by. The question of so-called support in schools, not in amount but in quality, must be addressed by the Government as part of their policy of inclusive education. If a child is given inadequate support, inappropriate support or ignorant support, his confidence, already low, will gradually fall even further. The tragedy in all this, and it is a tragedy, is that we know that early diagnosis and proper teaching can work. There are numbers of anecdotes of severely dyslexic people who succeed academically and otherwise as the result of proper teaching. The proof of this knowledge, sadly, is in independent schools. Nowhere is there such a huge gap between independent and maintained schools as in their provision to allow pupils access to specialist teachers. Attitudes have changed enormously over the past 20 years or so, and now the well known public schools—including the 25 schools comprising the Girls' Day School Trust—and nearly every private preparatory school, all of which are independent and very expensive, have at least one specialist teacher on staff either full time or for a few days a week. At the beginning of the debate the Minister indicated that the gap between academic and vocational education was to be narrowed, but surely we should be aiming to narrow the gap between independent and state education as well. That must be an aspiration of this or any other Government.