Education, education, education was Tony Blair’s mantra and it is a slogan that applies as much to assistive technology as it does to public policy.
Only with appropriate assistance at as young an age as possible can disabled school children hope to surmount the barriers that confront them.
Take dyslexia. Children start to read to learn at around the age of seven and by the age of ten the top 10% of pupils are reading1.4m words per year, greatly expanding their capacity to learn. By contrast the bottom 10% only manage around 8,000 words annually.
The slower readers need all the help they can get, which is why initiatives such as the Department for Children, Schools and Families’ alt format trial (see p7) are crucial.
The trial involves providing pupils with a small library of electronic texts which they can convert into whatever format they want.
Combined with efforts to train 4,000 teachers to identify and support children in England with dyslexia, these moves represent a vital step forward in tackling dyslexia..
But children with special educational needs are getting assistance across the board.
Next year, Home Access, the £300m scheme to provide children with computers to use at home, gets underway in earnest. Low-income families will be able to apply for a grant to purchase a Home Access computer and internet package.
The systems will come with a suite of assistive software and hardware as standard. Children with more complex needs will also be catered for.
Government efforts to provide the technology to benefit young learners coincide with an upsurge of innovative systems ranging from the Intel Reader, a portable optical character recognition device, to improved eye gaze systems and new aids to spelling and composition.
Many of these products can be seen at the BETT and Special Needs Fringe shows at Olympia in January.
However, things are not so happy in higher education. Thousands of students who began courses in the autumn are still waiting for computers and software that they need to study properly.
Administration of the Disabled Students Allowance by the Students Loan Company (SLC), which it took over from Local Education Authorities in the autumn, is a scandal, according to Lord Addington, the Lib Dem peer.
The SLC has promised to make improvements recommended in a report by Professor Deian Hopkins. Let us hope as the agency begins to take applications for next year that it will get its house in order sooner rather than later so that disabled students can study on equal terms with their non-disabled contemporaries..