My Lords, I support the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. For anyone who knows anything about the system, even in passing, it is brilliantly obvious that we should have had something like Amendment 70A in the Bill. If a child has been excluded twice, it is statistically almost inevitable that there will be a problem, and he or she should be assessed so that the problem can be identified accurately.
We all carry a degree of history with us in this Room. Mine is of dyslexia. The standard way you identify dyslexia is by the difference between spoken and written language. If you cannot speak correctly, the chances of identifying that person as dyslexic go down. We know there is comorbidity. You have to get into the system and look in the round. It is very important.
I have interests to declare. I have used voice recognition technology for years. It requires a degree of use of language verbally to have a way of dealing with that problem. We should thank the noble Lord for bringing to our attention the fact that everything about communication levels starts to come together in the spoken word or the written word. The way these
things hang together is always complicated and difficult. It gets more difficult to deal with them the later they are identified.
To say thank you to the Government, I think that Clause 22 is the most radical and brave thing I have seen in a Bill for a while—saying that we will go out and identify those with special educational needs. Most of the special educational needs lobby has been about saying to the educational establishment, “Oi! There’s a problem. Come over here and give us a hand”. I have lost track of the number of times I have had conversations with Members of both Houses of Parliament about dyslexic children and grandchildren: “How do you get the help?”, “Who do you go through?”, “What’s the matter?” and “Do we tell them they have a problem or not?”. Identification here is very important. Making that a stronger duty, despite the fact that it might be difficult, will make the rest of it easier. You cannot help someone if you do not know what the problem is. I very much support this amendment and the sentiment behind it.