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

Posted on by

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