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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

I am not saying that there is no training, but there is insufficient training. If there was more training, and it was more effective, the conditions would be discovered much earlier in children's education, but they are often not picked up until much later. One of the reasons for that is that LEAs think that every child with SEN costs money, so they delay applying that label to individual children for as long as possible. Why do not all teachers have access to the checklists that I have mentioned so that children can be identified when they first start primary school? If they were evaluated against a checklist covering speech, learning, reading, writing, attention, co-ordination, organisational abilities and ability to follow a daily routine, any issues could be identified earlier. I suspect that that is what the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West has in mind. We need much more openness about this issue, so that we can make the necessary investment so that we do not have 18 and 19-year-olds going to university undiagnosed. I read in the report that at Bangor university, some 400 to 500 students have been identified as suffering from dyslexia, and the professor who drew that fact to the attention of the Welsh Assembly said that many of those cases should have been identified long before that stage.