Beth Morrison, mother of Calum

'Calum was badly hurt in a restraint at Kingspark school. He was held by four people and left with sixty bruises and injuries that suggested positional asphyxia - a form of asphyxia which occurs when someone's position prevents the person from breathing adequately. He was eleven when he started at the school. Until then he was in a mainstream school with a special needs base. He has epilepsy, and he has got autistic type behaviours. He also has electrical activity over his brain at all times, even when he's asleep. He had very little language when he started at Kingspark. The reason he moved from his mainstream school was because at the time when he had a seizure it would affect his breathing and paramedics would have to be called in. When Kingspark opened in 2010, they had a fully staffed medical unit, with doctors and nurses onsite. So it seemed safer to us.

Never before had Calum ever come home with a mark on him. He is a very well behaved child. After a settling in period they decided he should go into a class in the enhanced support area. On the very first day when he was brought back in the taxi, I noticed that Calum had blue lips, the pallor he usually gets when he's had a seizure. He came up the stairs saying, "School's bad, school's bad. It's scary. I dizzy. Teacher hurt." I tried to phone the school. Nobody was available. His clothes had been sent home soaked with urine in a bag. Calum also said "Arm sore, arm sore."

The next morning, running a bath, I took his pyjama top off and found his arm covered in bruises. I felt sick. But still I sent him to school because I had to. I phoned the school again and the deputy head told me that Calum had an outburst and they had to restrain him. It had taken three adults to calm him down. I was shocked.

But that wasn't the worst incident. The next day the deputy head phoned me up and said there had been another restraint. This time she explained that it had happened when he was riding a bike in gym. He wasn't going in the right direction round the hall. Somehow we got from her demanding that he came off the bike to pulling him off, and to it escalating so that four staff had Calum face down on the floor in a prone restraint: two across his legs, one over the top of his body and another holding his chin off the floor.

When Calum came home I took his top off and there was a mark like a pomegranate from nipple to nipple. I thought it might be meningitis and and within 20 minutes we were in the GP surgery. She was horrified. He had over sixty bruises on his body. The marks on his chest were petechial haemorrhaging. All of Calum's injuries were consistent with being restrained very badly, held prone on the floor. What some experts think happened was that he would have been struggling to breathe because of lack of oxygen, his heart would have been pumping really quickly, so the blood vessels in his chest overfilled. Mostly likely he also passed out or had a seizure.'

A spokesman for Dundee City Council said: "The council is cooperating fully with an ongoing police investigation and will be making no further comment until that has been completed."

Lorraine Smith, mother of Graham

Graham was attending Beechbrae Education Centre, a school for behavioural problems in Elgin. One day in May last year, I got a call from the headteacher who said that something had happened. When I went to pick Graham up I found he had a cut lips, both bottom and top. His nose was bruised all the way down and the top of his eyelids had little pressure dots. My son said he had started punching the filing cabinet. The teacher told him to sit down. Graham kept standing up, so the teacher pushed him by his shoulders back onto the chair. All this climaxed in the teacher taking him by his shoulders, turning him round and forcing him down onto the ground. Graham landed on his face. Basically, I think the teacher lost control.

After his afternoon session I called A&E. They asked me to bring him up and then they called the police and they got involved. The teacher said he'd used a restraining principle for which he has been trained. The injuries are shocking. When I put them on Facebook people were so shocked it got 9,500 shares.

A Moray Council spokesperson said: "Beechbrae is a council-run resource for youngsters with varying degrees of challenging behaviours and staff have considerable experience of, dealing with a range of issues that may arise. Unfortunately there are occasions when staff have to restrain children in order to protect them from harming themselves or others. In this case separate and thorough investigations were carried out by the police and the council and found no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the member of staff."

Colin Wong, father of Anders

My son, Anders, was restrained at Pilrig Park school in Edinburgh and left heavily bruised. He was restrained by someone who didn't have the correct training. Anders is autistic and he can't verbally express himself and he was put on one to one with a teacher who had never had experience of autistic children before. On the day that it happened - which was actually Anders' birthday - the carer went in to pick him up from school, and Anders lifted his top up, to express that there was pain in his body, and showed that he had bruises all over his body. He had carpet burns on his back. We took him to Edinburgh Sick Kids hospital and they looked at his wrists, which had bruise marks all around, and at what looked like knee marks on his chest, and the friction marks on his back. It looked as if someone had kneeled on his chest to hold him down. Sick Kids immediately reported it to the police because he had so much bruising.

My son was fourteen at the time. But he's like a giant baby. He can't verbalise - so you can't put him on a witness stand. Eventually we got an apology and that was when he had to move to another school. But he's severely traumatised by the whole thing. He's never been the same since. He got very violent after and suffered from night terrors. They changed the course of his life when they did that.

A City of Edinburgh Council spokesperson said: "The allegations were thoroughly investigated and the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman concluded that no evidence was found of inappropriate use of force or restraint. We have apologised to the family over the distress and confusion caused by failing to keep accurate and consistent records."

Mary's story

(Names have been changed)

My son's wheelchair was being kept at the school. When I got it back it had about a dozen straps on it. I realised they were restraining him in the chair. On one occasion he came home with a broken tooth and I was told that he had headbutted the wall. But he had never done anything like that before. I knew from his behaviour that there was something going on. Then an escort told me that he had seen some of the staff holding him down in the wheelchair while getting him on the bus: three people, one pushing and the other two holding him down in the chair. The school admitted they used the wheelchair when he was naughty. I got the straps taken off and they stopped using it. But then instead they started putting him outside, for punishment.

Lisa's story

(Names have been changed)

At eight years old my son got sent away, because of a misdiagnosis of attachment disorder, to out of area school nearly 200 miles away. We asked for the restraint records from the school and they gave us a document with the dates, approximate times and approximate durations, and reason for restraint. Sometimes they were down as laughing, or silly behaviour. They seemed very keen on restraint. He has said he was in pain for days afterwards. When the level of restraints peaked there was nineteen in one month. In excess of one every two days. We asked questions about this but never got any answers.