I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about screening for neurodivergence in children at primary school; to make provision about teacher training relating to neurodivergence; and for connected purposes.
I thank hon. Members across the House for their support, and I thank the right hon. former Member for West Suffolk for bringing forward similar Bills in the past.
School was hard for me, and that is putting it lightly. Dyslexia meant that reading and writing was challenging. Words seemed to float all over the page—in fact, they are doing so right now, so I ask hon. Members to please bear with me through this speech as I am likely to make some mistakes. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder meant that concentrating was a nightmare, with the slightest thing pulling my attention away. I believed that school was not for me, I fell behind, I was bullied and I certainly acted out.
I am not alone in that. Since I started campaigning, I have heard from so many people who struggle, from constituents to celebrities such as Jamie Oliver, who is a great advocate in this area. I wish I could share them all today, but we would be here for many days.
Around one in seven people in the UK have what we might call neurodivergence. It is a non-medical umbrella term describing the ways people’s brains may develop or work differently from the norm. In some ways, we are all neurodivergent to a greater or lesser extent. Neurodivergence is not a weakness, a condition or a flaw—I want to make that crystal clear. In other ways, it is a superpower and you can do anything you want with the right support—I definitely have with what I have done today. We are problem solvers, critical thinkers and fantastic creators, but with those strengths come challenges such as reading, writing, social skills or maths. That does not mean there is anything wrong with us; it just means that we learn and understand things differently, and we might need to be supported in different ways from others.
I was lucky at school, because I was identified and got the support I needed. That is why I am standing here today. That support gave me the confidence to fight for what I believe in. Getting into politics and into this place was certainly not on my agenda at school, but I feel that I have to do all I can to make sure that everyone in communities such as Yeovil and beyond get the help that I had in school, or better.
Despite all the progress that our country has made in recognising and empowering neurodiverse people, and despite our amazing educators working their socks off—believe me, they do—things seem to have got worse in places such as Somerset since I was at school. Our schools are under-resourced, under-supported and local authorities are totally underfunded. We have the phonics screener, but this test does not cover all the areas that neurodiverse people may struggle and need support with, such as attention control or working memory. Evidence also suggests that neurodiverse children can just memorise the words for the test, meaning that their actual needs may be overlooked. That is one of their superpowers! Even when a child’s needs are identified, there is no proper dedicated special educational needs and disabilities training in initial teacher training or continuous professional development programmes. Nor is it there for teaching assistants. Our overworked teaching staff are pretty much just left to get on with it themselves, and that is not good enough.