Supporting & Understanding Dyscalculia

Dyscalculia – a condition that we feel hasn’t has enough attention for too long! For those of us who’ve actually heard of it, many of us still don’t fully understand it! To dispel myths and help to empower our community (and beyond) with knowledge, we’ve put together this brief resource on supporting and understanding Dyscalculia, with further signposting. We hope that this helps you to support a child or individual with Dyscalculia in your own life!

What is Dyscalculia?

Dyscalculia is known as a ‘specific learning difficulty’ involving numbers and quantity that is thought to affect around 5% of the global population. It isn’t just a ‘mathematics’ problem, and is actually a general numeracy, quantity and number ‘system’ understanding problem – so much more complex than being ‘bad at mathematics’. Spatial and mathematical concepts such as shape and geometry are often involved in Dyscalculia too. According to our expert speaker Amanda Keen, research into dyscalculia is roughly 30 years behind dyslexia!

Dyscalculia can have an impact on school learning as well as daily tasks like paying for bills, budgeting, shopping and processing data. In addition, a lot of people with Dyscalculia struggle with something called ‘maths anxiety’ whereby they feel nervous and worried at the thought of possibly needing to deal with numbers and quantities.

What are the signs of Dyscalculia?

Contrary to the common myth, Dyscalculia is not ‘just being bad at maths’. It is so much more complex than this. Please feel welcome to save our infographic on Dyscalculia and share on your social media & beyond to raise awareness!

Difficulty comparing value/quantity of numbers
Memory difficulties
Maths anxiety
May sometimes struggle to explain processes, pattern-spotting and sequences
Relies on finger counting and physical counters
Delayed information processing and retrieval compared to peers

How is Dyscalculia diagnosed?

Diagnosing dyscalculia and dyslexia should only be done by specially trained assessors with an appropriate qualification at Level 7. A screening test should be done beforehand before deciding whether to proceed to a full assessment as this is not always needed.

How can we support a child with Dyscalculia?

There’s so many ways in which we can support people with Dyscalculia. Here are some strategies – we’ll be discussing these more in-depth with our speaker Amanda Keen at our webinar – read on for more information on this!

Take time and be patient – don’t change materials too quickly, allow the child time to become used to them.
Play games with dice and dominoes so that the child can recognise common dot patterns; this will be a great visual and develop their differentiation between numbers.
Model the maths concepts with visuals and physical items such as counters.
Avoid paper worksheets and make mathematics materials more diverse and sensory.
Consistent repetition ‘little and often’.
Provide physical copies of multiplication tables and number bonds as this decreases pressure on the Dyscalculic child to recall these.

Understanding & Supporting Dyscalculia at Home & at School

Dyscalculia can cause stress and anxiety in children and young people, and often their difficulties go unnoticed, disregarded and misdiagnosed. Contrary to popular myth, Dyscalculia is not a case of ‘not being good at maths’ and goes way beyond ‘maths anxiety’, but with the right support Dyscalculic children and young people can absolutely flourish and demonstrate their skills. Getting a diagnosis and support for Dyscalculia children can be difficult, so we’re holding this webinar with the aim to answer all your questions during our expert seminar presented by specialist teacher Amanda Keen.

The session will cover: