At the end of February 2020, I submitted my report on the Review of the Implementation of the Additional Support for Learning (ASL) legislation in Scotland to the deputy first minister, John Swinney. Two years later, I still have very strong recollections of the distress and frustration shared with me by children, parents, teachers and other frontline practitioners. Many of them evidenced additional support for learning as not equally valued or visible within Scotland’s education system.
In the context of continuing political and media obsession with measuring attainment in the form of qualifications (as a proxy for education and learning), one of the primary consequences is a performance measurement that drives and disguises exclusion. It has led to processes that label, stigmatise and set thresholds for access to help only when at crisis levels, instead of supporting and facilitating early intervention.
Many of the implementation processes are in complete contradiction to the spirit and ethos of the ASL legislation. Fundamentally, the legislation is about the right of all our children and young people to recognition, inclusion, and help to flourish and succeed on their own terms. Yet I found thresholds requiring clinical diagnosis even for acknowledgement of a need and a focus on planning. These bore little relation to consequent action though complied with plan completion targets - a prime example of the wrong measures driving the wrong behaviours.
Behind these contradictions, and implicit in the current approach to implementation of Additional Support for Learning, is a deficit model of thinking. The belief that the purpose of “additional support” is to supplement or replace a deficit in the child that prevents them from succeeding by narrow standards of attainment and qualifications. While there is no shortage of good - sometimes excellent - policy and guidance on inclusion, what actually gets measured, and the standards by which children, teachers, and school leaders are judged and compared as “successful”, are exam results.
My heart sank when I read that the Scottish Conservatives had called for school funding to be more closely linked to “pupil performance”, presented as an incentive for schools to innovate. This is another contradiction. During my review, senior advisers told me that all politicians’ postbags are stuffed with letters from desperate parents and carers of children who do not fit in, yet we still see this mindset that assumes children are units of formal learning ability.
This approach also does nothing to acknowledge, account for and respond to the corrosive effects of poverty and inequality in family and community life, outwith the control of education. Nor does it account for the increase in children expressing distress through behaviours, which cause harm to themselves and to others. During the review, I heard some shocking comments about “bad” and “undeserving” poor children and their families, and a strong and unapologetic lobby for their exclusion.
There are deeply uncomfortable issues around behaviours that must be openly debated and considered in the context of all children’s rights and employer responsibilities. There are hard questions with no right answers in a world where there will never be enough resources. A huge part of the school and learning experience is social; it is a public service delivered in a group setting. But what are the limits and where are the edges?
A headteacher once said to me: “Schools need to be ready for children and young people as they are, not as we think they should be…there is a fantasy that someone out there can fix things…sprinkle magic dust and make the challenges go away.”
So what do schools need to look like now that 33 per cent of children in Scotland are identified as in need of additional support for learning? How do we protect and ensure the right to flourish equally, whether in or out of mainstream provision?
What inclusion is not is a veneer of performance measurement focused on keeping bodies in buildings, too often resulting in senior school staff containing distressed, disruptive children in their offices.
You needn’t look far to see where there is a fundamental breakdown in the delivery of the values underpinning rights and inclusion. News earlier this year around the Andrew G Webster QC report to Borders Council on their handling of school assault allegations is a lesson in the consequence of leadership disconnected from values and purpose.
What I found repeatedly was that protection against system failures for children who do not fit the standard model came from principle-driven individuals and teams showing leadership at all levels. It came from people who really knew and liked the children, who valued their own role and responsibility and who were determined to do the best for them.
“He just cared”, or “she just got it”. Such comments show the human connections and relationships that create value and visibility for children who do not fit the mould.
The future of education is under scrutiny in Scotland. This is a chance for change. We need to move away from conceptualising those with additional support needs as a costly afterthought, continuing to deny reality and failing to meet the needs of a third of our school-age children.
Instead, we need to refocus the vision on the children my review considered, understanding them as mainstream, not “additional”. Then, as the children and young people in the review told me, we can be confident of benefit to all children.
Angela Morgan was the Independent Chair of the Review of Implementation of Additional Support for Learning in Scotland 2019 - 2020.
This article was originally published in the summer 2022 edition of Insight, the membership magazine of national charity Children in Scotland
