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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the tennis academy in Roehampton. People there say that in order to produce the best tennis players, we need to identify the potential among tennis players at the ages of four, five and six. I saw children of those ages there. If we are identifying potential tennis stars at those ages, surely we should look at children of those ages to see whether they are, or are likely to, suffer from these various symptoms. The Government are not producing information on that, and they are certainly not training teachers to identify those characteristics, which may well be symptoms of dyslexia, dyspraxia or the other related conditions to which I have referred. Teachers and parents know at a pretty early stage whether children are reversing their letters, words and numbers, whether they are having difficulty copying from a blackboard, whether they are writing very slowly, whether their written work is hard to read, whether they are having difficulty structuring ideas on to paper or writing in a straight line, whether they are writing the minimum amount necessary or whether their use of grammar is incorrect. Those writing characteristics become apparent at a pretty early stage.