Category Archives: News

Lose, Lose, Lose

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Children with learning difficulties or disabilities and their parents face a “lose, lose, lose” situation, Sir Keir Starmer has said, as he pledged to press ahead with reforming special needs support in schools.

Downing Street backed Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, after she was criticised by Labour MPs and campaigners for refusing to guarantee that children with special needs would continue to have the same legal rights to bespoke support in school.

Ministers said that retaining the existing system would end up “failing children and failing parents” and insisted that reform should not result in the overall level of support for special needs being cut.

Read the whole article HERE

What happened in the House of Lords in the UK when they discussed dyscalculia?

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Late in the evening of Wednesday 4th June 2025 the first ever government debate on dyscalculia took place in the House of Lords. Introduced by Baroness Bull, the debate highlighted several issues with the awareness of, and provision for, dyscalculia. 

The Lords that participated in the debate were not short of suggestions to solve the problem, some perhaps more rooted in evidence than others. Perfectly sensible suggestions like ensuring funding for dyscalculia awareness, identification and support are brought in line with the funding for dyslexia are paired with more extreme suggestions to split the GCSE into functional maths and pure maths (the Maths Horizons report recently highlighted the issues with this proposal) alongside the usual calls to radically alter the maths curriculum to make it much more about practical uses of mathematics – this one often polarises maths teachers and leaders but Mark McCourt wrote very eloquently about the dangers of this including the famous phrase from George W. Bush about the “soft bigotry of low expectations”. One excellent suggestion, in my opinion, actually came from Baroness Bull in her speech to open the debate in which she highlighted that standard maths teaching and assessment can disadvantage dyscalculic students because of the volume of content in the curriculum and the focus on carrying out calculations quickly. Baroness Bull highlighted that some of the most successful approaches for teaching dyscalculic pupils include taking time to learn fundamental knowledge and skills in depth, alongside spaced revisiting and retrieval.

Read the whole article HERE

Best dyscalculia blog for 2025

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The readers from feedspot have chosen our blog as the number one dyscalculia blog for 2025. We are so humbled by this and will continue our journey to create awareness and knowledge about dyscalculia.

UK parliament getting serious about Dyscalculia

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The House of Lords will discuss Dyscalculia on June 4th.

Dyscalculia is a specific learning difficulty that affects the understanding of number-based information. Schools in England are responsible for identifying any special educational needs (SEN) arising from such learning difficulties, and initial teacher training from September 2025 will contain more content related to supporting children with SEN. However, campaigners highlight there remains no specific requirement for teachers to learn about dyscalculia and argue awareness of the learning difficulty remains low.

Read what they will discuss HERE

Math becomes optional in Kenya’s senior secondary school

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Kenya’s education ministry announced in March 2025 that mathematics would be an optional subject in senior secondary school, which begins in grade 10. Most students in this grade are aged 15 years. The education minister said the mathematics taught from grade 4 to grade 9 was sufficient for foundational “numeracy literacy”.

The change, in January 2026, is part of a shift to a new education system styled as the competence based curriculum. The decision is not to scrap maths altogether but rather to make it optional. However, given the poor performance in this subject, it is expected there will be few takers.

Read the debate about it HERE