Back in December of last year, after running major special reports on both the college and university sectors, The Herald education team (with help from one of our excellent politics reporters) decided to shine a light on the state of Additional Support Needs (ASN) provision in Scotland.
What we found was extraordinary and, in the worst cases, horrifying.
There has been a huge rise in the number of pupils recorded as having some sort of additional support need, which the figure now above 40%, and almost all of those young people are being education in mainstream classrooms.
The amount of funding per pupil with ASN has, however, dropped dramatically, as has the number of specialist ASN teachers. The number of dedicated schools for pupils with ASN (still formally known as ‘special schools’) has fallen enormously in the last fifteen years.
There is a clear correlation between deprivation levels and additional support needs, with those from the poorest backgrounds being much more likely to need some kind of ASN provision.
Pupils with ASN have lower attendance rates, far higher exclusion rates, and a significantly smaller chance of leaving school with at least one National 5 or Higher qualification.
The largest percentage increases for ASN reasons between 2013 and 2023 applied to bereavement (+509%), mental health problems (+601%) and young carers (+680%).
You can see all of the stats that we pulled together right here.
But it wasn’t just the numbers. We also heard from parents like Michaela, who has spent more than twenty years fighting a constant, cyclical battle to ensure that her son’s needs are met and his rights are respected. Some parents (Michaela is one of them) have had to quit their careers in order to “pick up the pieces of a failing education system” that seems incapable of meeting their children’s needs.
The Children and Young People’s Commissioner for Scotland told us that pupils all over Scotland are “being let down” and that the system needs “radical reform”.
My colleague Rebecca McCurdy wrote about her own experiences, having been diagnosed with dyspraxia at the age of 21.
In the past, we’ve also heard directly from young people, including Emily Bulcraig – a young autistic woman who wrote a heart-breaking letter explaining what school was really like for her.
Now, Audit Scotland have turned their attention to ASN provision, releasing a new briefing report on the matter. The top line, as per their press release, is that the Scottish Government and all councils “must fundamentally rethink how they plan, fund and staff additional support for learning as part of core school education in Scotland.”
Why? Because even though the law was changed more than two decades ago, introducing a more inclusive system that was supposed to ensure that we ‘get it right for every child’, the Scottish Government “failed to plan for the impacts of this inclusive approach.” This is quite the oversight, although it’s not an enormously surprising revelation at this stage.
To be clear, however, it means that responsibility for the current problems cannot be laid entirely at the door of the SNP, because the planning that should have happened would have taken place under a Labour and LibDem coalition.
The other major problem concerns data gaps and, after being in government for multiple generations, the SNP are going to have to accept the blame on that one. This isn’t new either though, and do not for one second make the mistake of thinking that Audit Scotland are the first to point out that “poor data means it is not possible to determine the scale, complexity and nature of needs across Scotland.”
When you start adding together the other issues raised in the Audit Scotland report, you quickly realise just how damning their analysis has been, but there’s something else – something much more important – to bear in mind: behind the headlines and the press statements and all the data are children who are being let down in ways that will harm them not just at this point, but potentially for the rest of their lives. And we’ll all pay the price for that.
The stakes are about as high as they could possibly be but, as the new report helps to point out, the people in charge have never taken this issue anything like as seriously as they should have.
So what should happen now?
Audit Scotland recommends that, within 6-12 months, the government and councils should agree on how to collect and record consistent, effective data. You’d like to think that this would be a fairly manageable task, but my advice would be to not hold your breath.
Then, in the short-term (12-24 months) we should see the roll out of a “national measurement framework that better demonstrates the outcomes for pupils with additional support needs”, and the annual publication of data “to better identify the scale, complexity and nature of additional support needs.”
During that window, the government and councils are also told to review how they plan for, fund and staff additional support provision in mainstream education.
Finally, in the “longer term”, they are told to publish “clear and transparent annual reports” (yes, that would be nice…) and to “implement any identified changes that are required to the funding and staffing of ASL in mainstream and special education and to the design of school buildings”.
In simple terms, this means ‘actually do stuff rather than just talking a good game’.
But that, as ever, is going to be the biggest challenge of all.
