Interview: Matt Hancock MP
Fiona Simpson
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
Fiona Simpson speaks to the former Health Secretary about better support for dyslexic children.
“I think it’s shocking that still only one in five dyslexic kids are identified in school,” says Matt Hancock as he sits down in his Westminster Office to discuss plans for his new Dyslexia Screening Bill (see box).
Hancock, the former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, was diagnosed with dyslexia – a neurodiversity which affects people’s ability to read, write and spell – at the age of 18 after being encouraged to get an assessment by his politics, philosophy and economics tutor at Oxford University.
Hancock, the MP for Newmarket, describes his diagnosis as a “lightbulb moment”, explaining that he had gone through school thinking he was “just rubbish” at English and foreign languages.
Aware of his privilege, Hancock admits he got into the top-rated UK university “basically on my maths” but struggled with the essay-based content of his chosen degree.
“I got to the end of the first term and my tutor called me into the office and said ‘look Matt, when we’re talking, you get it but then you can’t write it down’,” he recalls, praising Oxford’s “amazing educational psychology department”.
Tools to relearn
Oxford University staff worked with Hancock to provide him with the tools to “relearn to read and write in a way that worked for me”, he explains. “I learned to recognise words as pictures and that sped up my reading and meant I could write better.”
Hancock concedes that he is “lucky”.
“I had my maths to rely on so that I could get to a brilliant university, I did get identified albeit aged 18, I then got the support I needed and I ended up in a career that I enjoyed,” he says.
“There are huge strengths to the dyslexic brain but we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that for too many people dyslexia leads to illiteracy and much, much worse outcomes and we’ve got to both celebrate the diversity of thought and make sure people get the support they need.”
Reducing stigma
For Hancock, a key focus of his bill is about reducing the stigma around having dyslexia.
“People worry that if you identify somebody as dyslexic, it might undermine their confidence because you are labelling them whereas when you are identified as a dyslexic it helps bring you confidence because you know what the problem is.
“There is no correlation between dyslexia and academic intelligence but it sure as hell feels like one if you don’t know what the problem is,” he admits.
A wider campaign is needed on top of the bill to change social perceptions, Hancock says, crediting the confidence he gained from his diagnosis for kick-starting his career in politics.
“It gave me the confidence to think, this is a specific neurological problem that I can work to mitigate and everything else, therefore, became easier and now here I am in politics which is all about the use of language,” he adds.
Unfortunate errors
Hancock is quick to explain that his route to becoming Health Secretary during a pandemic has not been without problems related to his dyslexia.
“In my lifetime, thankfully, somebody came along and invented spell check at about the right point,” he jokes, adding that he once “met the inventor of the squiggly red line and thanked him on behalf of all dyslexics”.
He notes that while the tool has “made life much, much easier, it still left me with problems where if you spell certain words wrong they form other words.
“I had one terrible experience when I was working for the then MP for Guildford and in his address for the 2001 election, he wrote ‘I want to unite the community’ – I thought it was a good phrase, pulled out this phrase and typed it in big font on the front of the document.”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t until after the fliers had been sent to 40,000 residents that Hancock was informed his edit read: “I want to untie the community.”
“He lost by 400 votes – he’s forgiven me now,” Hancock laughs, “I still make the occasional error but I can do it well enough to get by.”
Finding confidence
Despite appearing completely comfortable with opening up about his dyslexia, Hancock reveals he was “very nervous” about going public with the information during an interview with GQ magazine in 2018 when he entered the Cabinet as Culture Secretary.
It was only when his private secretary confided in Hancock that he too was dyslexic and encouraged him to speak out that he spoke about it to the Civil Service Neurodiversity Network.
The “warm reception” he received with “people saying thank you, as a public figure, for talking about this”, prompted Hancock to go public.
“The reaction was amazing because you make yourself quite vulnerable. People write to me with their own stories, especially of late diagnosis. People in their 20s, 30s, 40s who have only recently been diagnosed and there are some really moving stories,” he says.
Teacher training
Another key element of improving outcomes for young people with dyslexia is broadening teacher training on neurodiverse conditions, Hancock insists, explaining that tools such as phonics, which are widely used to teach neurotypical pupils to read, do not work for all neurodiverse children.
When asked if there is a concern that this would increase pressure on already overstretched teachers, Hancock says that “all teachers are teachers of dyslexic children”.
“Teaching is a challenging and rewarding profession and one in which I’m sure every good teacher can agree is one in which we can constantly try to improve and this is an improvement.”
He goes on to reveal that he has fed into the Department for Education’s upcoming review of support for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).
“I’ve already been in contact with ministers in the department in terms of shaping that,” he says, adding that a further consultation on recommendations will take place following the planned publication of the review in the first quarter of this year.
Children’s outcomes
Describing Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi as a “very good friend” – the pair wrote a book together in 2011 on the 2008 financial crash – Hancock says there is “no way” the levelling-up pledge to see 90 per cent of children achieving the expected standard of reading, writing and maths by 2030 will be met without support for dyslexic children, including mandatory screening.
He says: “I’m confident that Nadhim cares about moving in this direction from his own different experience of arriving in England and not being able to speak the language. He’s had the same sort of challenges around being able to communicate in English effectively.”
Challenges for children who arrive in England part-way through primary education or those who do not speak English at home will be “taken into account” during dyslexic screening, Hancock adds, saying that gathering data on both the written and oral progress of these children is “even more important” in picking up communication issues than in their English-speaking peers.
Despite refusing to be drawn on whether he would support a ban on exclusions and suspensions for children with dyslexia and other special educational needs, Hancock does highlight the need for screening in planned secure schools, the first of which is due to open in Medway in 2023, and within the wider youth justice system. More than half of the prison population across the adult and youth justice estates are dyslexic.
“I’d like to address this at root cause by sorting out identification in the education system but we also need to support people who are in prison,” he says.
Hancock also agrees on the need to push employers and apprenticeship providers to take on more young people with neurodiverse conditions, noting that 40 per cent of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic.
Pandemic lessons
Dyslexia offered him his biggest “life lesson” in his time as Health Secretary during the pandemic, Hancock concludes, explaining, “you have to focus on the big questions, you have to have a team around you who can do the things you can’t. That is a life lesson for everybody: you have people with different strengths and weaknesses and that’s how we ran the pandemic”.
DYSLEXIA SCREENING BILL
Drawing on his own experience, Hancock is working to see dyslexia screening for all primary schools made compulsory through his Dyslexia Screening Bill.
The bill, which will have its second reading in parliament later this month, calls for all children to be screened in the later stages of Key Stage Two.
“I am very clear in the bill that this is screening not formal assessment. What I’m pushing for is screening to give schools data on who ought to be assessed,” explains Hancock likening the process as similar to early years hearing screening but for older children.
“It can be done fairly easily and cheaply online and I hope freely because these resources exist. The truth is, it is already done in lots of schools, it is just not done for everybody and is not done in the majority of schools.”
THE COST OF DYSLEXIA
A report by all party-parliamentary group for dyslexia and other specific learning difficulties on the educational cost of dyslexia, published in 2019 found that:
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Between 800,000 and 1.3 million children and young people in education have dyslexia
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More than 80 per cent of young people with dyslexia will leave school without diagnosis
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A student with dyslexia is twice as likely to fail to achieve a grade 4 or above in English and maths at GCSE
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A student with dyslexia is three and a half times more likely to be temporarily or permanently excluded
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Youth offending institutes have dyslexia rates between 31 and 56 per cent