Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to congratulate the member for Dawson for bringing this motion to the House tonight. Whilst I do not agree with all aspects of it, I believe it is important to ensure that dyslexia is acknowledged as a significant learning disability and that significant resources are placed into assisting young people and children that have dyslexia. I have experienced it within my own family. I have two children who have been to university and were high achievers who could cope very well with anything that was put before them academically, but I have one child who had dyslexia. His life, the roads that he took and the opportunities that he has had in life were very different to the opportunities that my two children who did not have dyslexia had. He works in a manual area, but the problem is constantly having to convince those around you that you are able to do things, because in our society we rely so much upon being able to read the written word, and following instructions is so important.

Dyslexia is estimated to affect about 10 per cent of the Australian population. In Australia the terms 'dyslexia', 'specific learning disabilities', 'learning difficulties' and 'LD' are used interchangeably as umbrella terms for a variety of difficulties which may or may not be dyslexia. Dyslexia is, I think, best understood if you look at it from the point of view of persistent difficulty with learning to read and spell. I know from my own personal experience that people with dyslexia develop different regimes for dealing with life so that they can get around their inability to read. They develop different ways of learning.

Dyslexia has been shown to be resistant to traditional teaching methods, and there have been a lot of individualised programs that have been adopted around teaching students with dyslexia. But students need different programs. There are different causes and types of dyslexia, and it is important that teachers know how to identify a student who has dyslexia and how to develop programs and teaching methods to assist that student.

The government has recognised that there is a need to provide support for students with learning difficulties and disabilities, and that is why $100 million in Commonwealth funding will be going into schools in the school year 2014. It is well and truly long overdue, because our schools need to have the money and the resources to be able to give those students that have specific learning needs the assistance that they need. At the moment there is limited knowledge of the number of students that actually need this support, and that needs to be collected. We need to get nationally consistent data, and once we get this data we need to put it together in a way that will then be useful to develop and deliver those programs.

I think that a number of the suggestions in the member for Dawson's motion have real merit and deserve investigation, because students who have dyslexia need extra support. I think that support while they are undergoing NAPLAN, in the classroom, with their homework and in a number of different environments is very important if they are going to achieve their optimal level of learning. So I congratulate the member for Dawson for bringing it to the House.

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