Summary
Our Activities and Impact
The Dyscalculia Network is largely volunteer-led and is run primarily by our two co-founders.
Cat Eadle and Rob Jennings. As such, all our activities take place alongside our volunteers’ work and responsibilities. We can therefore say that we are very proud of the impact we have made, given these obvious restrictions.
Our new website has been further developed over the past year.
We have added a new workplace section (following feedback from our Adult Advisory Board and businesses) that offers advice and support to employers on dyscalculia and links to other valuable resources. We were the keynote speakers for Newcastle Building Societies Neurodiversity Day.
We have also launched two new website pages for children and young people. These pages were developed in collaboration with Loughborough University and feature children with Dyscalculia talking about their experiences (something that parents had frequently requested). They provide age-appropriate information (Primary and Secondary), including information on what to expect from an assessment, and include some downloadable activities featuring our new mascot ‘Bloc’.
We have also collaborated with Autopress Education to launch a new manipulative shop on our website and have co-created new dyscalculia friendly resources. We have also updated our Dyscalculia Day page to reflect our ongoing commitment to this yearly event.
Our Dyscalculia Day 2025 event was our largest and most successful campaign to date. We hosted three separate online conferences designed for educators, parents, adults with dyscalculia, and those who support them. We had a record number of attendees at our educator conference.
We raised awareness through :
The launch of a new ‘Dyscalculia’ pin, which was very much welcomed by the community with 200 sales to date. We have also gifted pins to our Main Advisory Board and Adult Advisory Board.
- The launch of our new Dyscalculia Network Mascot – ‘Bloc’, who now features in all our work with children and young people (although the adults love him too!) and on merchandise. Â
- We provided a set of free downloadable activities for primary and secondary schools to use on Dyscalculia Day.
- We raised awareness through our social media campaign promoting the day, including #dancefordyscalculia (with a local vicar raising over £1,000 for us with her dance!), sharing people’s lived experiences of dyscalculia, including strengths and challenges. On Facebook alone, we had 340,000 views for the month up to Dyscalculia Day.
- We successfully campaigned for dyscalculia to be the topic of the day on ‘All on the Board’.
- We also liaised with and had the support of Baroness Bull, who wrote a fabulous article on Dyscalculia for Politics Home in support of Dyscalculia Day.
We have worked closely this year with Baroness Bull and her assistant, Michela Barbieri, as well as our advisory boards and community, to develop a briefing document on dyscalculia. This will be used for a debate in the House of Lords.
We have been fortunate to be allowed to join the Council for Disabled Children. We presented to all companies linked to this organisation, explaining what Dyscalculia is, how it affects children in the classroom, and what we can do to support learners. We have supported and contributed to a number of briefing documents from the CDC to DfE, Ofsted and SEND reform (from a Dyscalculia/ Maths Difficulties perspective). This work is currently ongoing.
We also organised Maths Anxiety Day, which included three webinars and a social media campaign aimed at raising awareness of Maths Anxiety and exploring the links between maths anxiety, dyscalculia, and maths difficulties. This was again organised to benefit three of our target groups, educators, parents and adults with dyscalculia.
We have once again worked closely with Loughborough University on our Children’s Dyscalculia pages and offered support for their research work. We have also partnered with UCL to secure funding for a new research project on the lived experiences of children and adults with dyscalculia. This project is now underway, and we look forward to sharing the results in due course.
We have continued to offer monthly free Q&A webinars, and these have a growing national and international clientele. These Q&A sessions help us support more people, but we also respond to numerous daily individual emails and messages via our social media channels.
We have expanded our reach into Great Britain (one of our targets for the year) and have exhibited at an Education Scotland event in Glasgow, visited the Education Show in Cardiff and worked closely with Ulster University to create, in January, the first very well-received dyscalculia conference in Northern Ireland in Belfast. We have also translated our key information sheets into Welsh. We have also continued to speak and exhibit at events in England, including the TES shows in London and Bolton, Positive Dyslexia’s Twickenham and Edge Hill Conferences, the Isle of Wight Dyscalculia and Dyslexia Conference, Dyslexia Guild Conference, MEI Keele University Conference, Oxfordshire SEND conference, and the Mathematics Association Conference.
Our international audience has been growing. We visited an international school in Luxembourg, where we delivered three days of training on Maths Difficulties, attended by the maths team, learning support staff, parent groups, and whole-school teachers. In Northern Ireland (along with the first ever Dyscalculia conference in Belfast), we delivered training in two separate regional college groups on three different campus locations in the country. Additionally, we produced a series of four online presentations for the South-East Regional College group. We have also liaised with organisations in Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands.
We now offer monthly webinars tailored to different groups within our community and have added recordings to our website to begin building an extremely useful and comprehensive bank of resources that our community can utilise.
We also held our first online Dyscalculic Adults Pub Night, including a great music quiz, all hosted by our Adult Advisory Board.
We advised the team at EastEnders on a storyline about dyscalculia, and this was followed by working with a BBC reporter on a TV, newspaper and online piece about dyscalculia.
We have visited numerous schools, colleges and Maths Hubs to deliver teacher training, as well as working with several teacher-training colleges to provide initial teacher training on dyscalculia. These have been carried out across the country in locations such as Newcastle, Preston, York, Eastbourne, three separate schools on the Isle of Wight, South London, Henley-on-Thames, Bristol, Bath Spa, Milton Keynes, Buckingham, Humberside and Dorset.
We have also continued our work in training community organisations, such as Northampton Adult Education Organisation, and the police force. Additionally, we have participated in podcasts, including those for GL Assessment, Neurobox, and SENDCAST. We have also continued to provide termly CPD for the assessors and tutors who list with us.
We have created and delivered a new OCN-accredited Level 3 Dyslexia and Dyscalculia Course in conjunction with Positive Dyslexia, which we delivered three times during the year, with excellent feedback from the delegates.
We have also created new opportunities for sponsors to support our work through sponsoring our webinars or events.
We have continued to expand our social media footprint and audience. Alongside Facebook, Twitter (X), Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn, we have now joined Blue Sky. We have an audience of approximately. 35,000 followers across our platforms. This provides not only a much-needed sense of community and support for all our key stakeholders but also opportunities to disseminate key research and developments within the field.
Our regular newsletter now reaches over a thousand people.
Consultations with Stakeholders
Over the past year, we have had two meetings with our Advisory Board. During these meetings, we discuss what we have achieved since the past meeting and ways to move the network forward. This year, we have also welcomed a new member to the advisory board, Prof. Jo Van Herwegen. The board contributed expansively to our policy briefing for the House of Lords, making many key points that were included in the final briefing. The consultations were also instrumental in our decision to enhance our outreach work across Great Britain, to join Blue Sky, and to seek sponsors for events, such as Dyscalculia Day. Our advisory board continue to inspire and support us. This includes consultation on the next steps for the coming year.
We regularly meet with our Adult Advisory Board (adults with dyscalculia who are passionate about raising awareness of dyscalculia) and converse via our WhatsApp group. We have welcomed two new members this year. The Adult Advisory Board worked particularly hard in the run-up to Maths Anxiety Day and Dyscalculia Day, providing social media content and liaising with other organisations to raise awareness about dyscalculia. The group met and made many suggestions for our briefing to the House of Lords which were included in the document. The Adult Advisory Board have been instrumental in our decisions to host more online and in-person meet-ups for adults with dyscalculia and maths difficulties, and to expand our services for adults, but also in our drive to reach more educators through our educator training to change the experiences of young people within school (who often go undiagnosed and get little support).
In January 2025, we also created a new ‘Parent Advisory Board’ and have since held our first two meetings. The group initially met to inform our policy briefing for the House of Lords, providing insightful thoughts on how we can better support dyscalculic children and young people within our community in school and beyond. These suggestions were included in our final briefing. The group is keen to mobilise parents by encouraging them to participate more on our social media and exploring the possibility of applying for grants to support our work, which have both been included in our next year’s targets.
This year, our assessors and tutors who list with us have been very active within our community. Our WhatsApp group remains a valuable source of professional support for all of us and an excellent platform for shaping and sharing ideas. Many of our group members have spoken at our monthly webinars, joined us at events (including the TES Show and Positive Dyslexia’s Dyscalculia Conference), and contributed to the creation of website pages, blogs (including our monthly, ‘Fixit with Karen Series), social media posts, materials for educators, and materials for the group. The whole group benefited from the work of a smaller focus group, which created a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ document which has been added to our WhatsApp group. This document is especially useful for newly qualified assessors and tutors.
We provide termly CPD for this group on topics requested by them. The group has requested SASC-approved training on the new definition of Dyscalculia and guidance (SASC March 2025), which has been added to the calendar for 2025-2026.
We have further developed our strong relationships with both Loughborough and UCL.
We continue to work regularly with other organisations who work in the field of dyscalculia and neurodiversity. This year, we have joined the Council for Disabled Children and continued our work with the National Neurodiversity Youth Network and CReSTeD (where we are a member of the main council). We have collaborated with National Numeracy, Positive Dyslexia, Nessy, Twinkl and many Maths Hubs and universities. (Bath Spa, Southbank in London, St. Mary’s in Twickenham and Liverpool).
We also continue to communicate with our approximately 35,000 social media followers worldwide by responding to their comments and messages. We frequently use this data, including data from polls, to inform our decisions, such as where adult meetups should take place or what services the community would like us to provide, e.g., tuition groups for adults completing Functional Skills exams. The community we serve have been very supportive of our work with the House of Lords and contributed greatly to the briefing we created.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support and encouragement we couldn’t do it without you!
