Dyscalculia

A specific difficulty with number. As common as dyslexia, and almost nobody gets identified.

What it is

Dyscalculia affects around 5% of people, which puts it roughly level with dyslexia. Identification rates are a fraction of dyslexia's, and support is rarer still.

It is a specific difficulty understanding numbers: not arithmetic taught badly, and not maths anxiety, although the second usually follows.

The core difficulty is with number sense itself, the intuitive grasp of quantity that most people develop without instruction. Someone with dyscalculia may not immediately see that a group of five is more than a group of three without counting.

Signs you might notice

Counting on fingers well beyond the age peers stop.

Difficulty estimating: how long something takes, how far away something is, how much a trolley of shopping costs.

Trouble remembering number facts, even ones practised heavily. Times tables that never stick.

Confusing similar digits and reversing them.

Difficulty with money, change, time, and reading a timetable.

Real distress about maths, and avoidance of anything involving numbers.

How it can affect day-to-day life

The adult consequences are practical and serious. Managing money, budgeting, understanding a payslip or a bill, working out a medication dose, catching a train.

It restricts careers, because so many roles use a numeracy test as a gate, and it affects confidence disproportionately because innumeracy is still socially acceptable to mock in a way illiteracy is not.

Maths anxiety compounds it. Anxiety consumes working memory, which is exactly the resource number work needs.

Supporting someone well

Allow a calculator without treating it as cheating, exactly as with text-to-speech for dyslexia.

Use concrete materials for far longer than seems age-appropriate. Physical objects build the number sense that symbols alone do not.

Reduce time pressure. Timed tests measure anxiety in this population, not understanding.

Teach money and time explicitly as practical skills, not as maths topics.

Break multi-step problems down and write each step.

Separate the maths from the subject. If a science question is really testing understanding of a process, do not let the arithmetic decide the mark.

Our neurodiversity and SEND pre-screening covers cognition and learning, including number, and produces a profile in the language a SENCo will act on.

Where to get help

Schools can put support in place now, without a diagnosis. Ask the SENCo what is being done.

Assessment is by an educational psychologist or specialist assessor. The British Dyslexia Association covers dyscalculia and has an assessment service.

Adults at work can get support through Access to Work.