Dyspraxia

In UK education services, the term ‘learning difficulty’ includes children and young people who have ‘specific learning difficulties’, for example dyslexia, but who do not have a significant general impairment of intelligence. The Special Educational Needs codes also use the terms ‘moderate learning difficulty’, ‘severe learning difficulty’ and ‘profound multiple learning difficulty’, which relate to general impairments in learning of different severity. These could be seen as interchangeable with the term ‘learning disability’ which is used in health and social care, and the groups of mild, moderate, severe and profound learning disabilities explained below.

In America the term ‘learning disability’ has a different meaning to that used in the UK. In the USA, learning disability is used to cover several specific learning disorders particularly in relation to reading, writing and maths, such as dyslexia, dyspraxia and dyscalculia.