Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-04-27
Topic: Education
Dominic Hubbard (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, Clause 2, and in particular subsection (2), caused me considerable disquiet when first I saw it. Subsection (2) starts with setting out the minimum requirement for home education, which must include, "reading, writing and numeracy, which takes into account the child’s age". Okay, there are some caveats, but my concern is quite simple. I am dyslexic. If you were to put me in a system where I was tested on, for instance, my spelling, I would still be being home educated now. My brain is constructed so that I do not store knowledge easily and cannot deal with it. If you put extra work on to a dyslexic, they will forget more. Problems with short-term memory and recall processes, which allow you to do this, mean they cannot do it. Children with other special educational needs will have other problems, all of them requiring some change in the learning pattern. Subsection (2) mentions "ability" and "aptitude", but what does that mean here? You would need a complicated assessment to find out Special educational needs are mentioned at the end of subsection (2). As I have said before, far too much attention has been paid to education, health and care plans. Noble Lords should remember that they are designed to deal only with those at the extreme end of the spectrum. Most people with a special educational need do not qualify for one and should not. A child could have a fairly minor problem and end up in home education because of an unsympathetic teacher or because something has gone wrong—that can happen, and a child can end up in the wrong place. Dyslexics make up about 10% of the population, and if we include those with other special educational needs, it goes up to around 20%. If we put these requirements on children who need different learning patterns, we will be in trouble. That is especially true for those who do not qualify for assessment or who have not been assessed and where there is an emotional need that gets in the way of that assessment. That is why I do not want this included here. We have spoken already in a previous group about what is going on here and that assessments should be more flexible When discussing this with my wife, she pointed out to me, "Oh! If it is just reading and writing, there could be one text". Let us start with a text that is not too scary: the King James Bible. How many books you would get through before you get to Mein Kampf, I am not sure, but it is a process. Reading, writing and arithmetic are regarded as the bedrock of education, but they can be merely tools to acquire an education. A couple of weekends ago, I was at a conference at which we spoke about dyslexia. The main thrust was that more people can learn to read books than can understand what is inside them. I do not think that that is a very controversial point. These are tools for education. If you are obsessed with these tools and their acquisition, you will get in the way of learning Are you allowed, for instance, to have a book read to you by the numerous bits of technology we have? I must declare an interest: the firm that I am chairman of, Microlink, provides such packages. If we are going down this route, with technology that turns text to voice and voice to text, which is a perfectly normal way of dealing with certain things—the way that the blind deal with these things is a very related technology—all of it would be under threat if we have this wording in the Bill Overloading somebody who does not respond well to these pressures is almost a guarantee of educational failure. Indeed, that is why many people might be removed from that system and I know have been in the past—a teacher says, "He’s dyslexic. Let’s give him extra spelling", but they just reinforce failure and make a child more resistant. They have made the problem just that bit worse and they will do it again the next day and the day after that This wording cannot be in the Bill. Something that suggests an education would be fine; trying to put down an education that is appropriate, having taken advice, is okay. I am fine with that. But the minute you get these caveats and absolutes you are guaranteeing failure for fairly large groups, even with the best tuition in the world. You do not deal with this problem by doing this. Autistics and dyspraxics have another variation on this. Dyscalculics—that is not an officially recognised term, but that is a battle for another day—will have a problem with numeracy. We need to have a great deal more flexibility than we have now. These words cannot be in the Bill if it is to mean anything and it is not to damage these groups I do not want to have to stop this and call a Division. At the moment, I think that this would probably be something that we would look forward to on Report. However, I will do unless there is some way of getting this wording out. If we get this into law, we will create more and worse problems. I beg to move.