In just 808 words, a narrator - known simply as “M, a young person” - tells a horrific story about their brother that’s one of the most heartbreaking things you are likely to read this year. But this is no Stephen King story - it is the opening section of a formal report about children’s experience of the education system in Scotland.

We are presented with the brother in the foetal position, defending himself from a “leader” who causes him trauma “time and again”. We read of “two enormous figures looming over a cowering child” who is “sobbing uncontrollably”; of a boy who communicates by growling, screaming or crawling through corridors to find his sibling. The boy prefers to bunny-hop when he’s in a hurry - because he has learned that when he runs in search of a safe, dark place, adults will converge and “trap” him.

For anyone used to reading official reports laden with jargon and peppered with statistics, this raw account of one child’s nightmarish experience at school will hit hard.

The report, published today by children’s commissioner Bruce Adamson, is titled No Safe Place: restraint and seclusion in Scotland’s schools, and it’s a sobering read for anyone who thinks schools have ditched the punitive approaches of the past and become paragons of compassion.

“M”, who was aged 10 or 11 at the time of the incidents they write about, wanted to scream at the teachers who worked with their brother, but was “always very polite and made the mistake of trusting them”.

They say: “I never thought that people who I had been brought up to listen to and respect could cause this: the despair; the terror; the anguish; the silence; the sickly pallor; the retreat into his imaginary world where no one could reach him.”

M also recalls other children who echoed the lack of compassion shown by adults, who mocked and made up poems and stories about their family. “I couldn’t understand why they hated my brother,” they recount.

The school is gone now - “a distant nightmare” - and M’s brother has gone on to become a secondary pupils who is “tall, proud, popular and confident”, and whose modern studies teacher believes should go into politics.

M addresses him at the end of the story: “The only thing I would ever change about you is other people’s attitudes.” With that, the tone is set for the rest of the report: some 14,000 words on why the use of restraint and seclusion in Scottish schools today shows us that the education sector may not have advanced as much as we think.

In it, there are a lot of euphemisms for the room that children - usually those with additional support needs - are put into when their behaviour becomes too difficult for school staff to cope with. A recent event organised by autistic children’s charities heard from parents who said that, in one school, it was called “the soft room” and in another “the blue room”. One parent even talked about lobbying her son’s secondary to put a window in the door of the room he was secluded in so at least he could be observed.

Now, today’s damning report into seclusion and restraint in schools - the first investigation to be carried out by Scotland’s children’s commissioner (see box, “Beefed-up powers lead to investigation”, page 18) - has found that these spaces in which children are shut up alone are also referred to as “the chill-out room”, “the quiet room”, “the calming room”, “the de-escalation room”, “the safe space”, a “time out” room and, some would argue more accurately, “solitary”.

The report warns councils that by placing children in these spaces, they could be acting illegally and are “running the risk of significant rights breaches with all the attendant legal and financial consequences”. It also cautions councils to be careful with their language, which at times can be “somewhat Orwellian”, particularly when it comes to the euphemisms that councils use for restraint.

The Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland (CYPCS) defines restraint as holding a child or young person to restrict their movement (see box, “CYPCS definitions”, page 18). But it found that councils variously described restraint as “an act of care”, as “supportive”, and even a “positive handling phase”. Such wording “inadvertently underplay[s] the nature of the act”, says the report, and is in “stark contrast” to the way in which children and young people perceive the intervention.

“Children can be distressed, they can feel humiliated or degraded [following a physical intervention],” says Nick Hobbs, head of advice and investigations at the CYPCS, who led the nine-month enquiry. “These are things that have a hugely profound impact on children and that can last quite some time. These are not things they can just brush off.”

Today’s report hits out at the Scottish government and councils for failing to monitor the use of restraint and seclusion in schools. It calls on the government to provide “clear direction to local authorities in order to ensure consistent policies and mechanisms for recording across the country”. It is impossible to know “with any degree of certainty” how many incidents of restraint and seclusion take place in Scottish schools each year, which children are most affected, how frequently and how seriously, because councils are failing to record the data, the report finds.

Local authority policies and guidance on the issue, meanwhile, were found by the investigators to either be nonexistent - as was the case in four councils - or contradictory, confusing and incomplete. Where guidance does exist, it “seldom” acknowledges the “physical and mental trauma” that children often experience as a result of being locked up or held down.

Seclusion guidance is often found within the local authority school-exclusion policy, prompting the investigators to say they are concerned that “seclusion may be used as an informal method of school exclusion, circumventing the need to go through the proper processes” - which the report notes is “unlawful”.

Teachers and parents are being let down by the government and councils, says Hobbs. Good policies, he points out, let staff know what is expected of them, what good practice should look like, and when actions might breach children’s human rights.

“Good policy and guidance are the prerequisites for being able to scrutinise and challenge practice from the point of view of parents and children,” says Hobbs.

“When they send their child to school, it lets them know what to expect from the people looking after them. From the point of view of staff, it lets them know what is expected, which is so important for staff, as well as parents and children. Dealing with these situations can be quite difficult for staff to cope with.”

But just because there is a lack of guidance, it does not mean seclusion and restraint are not occurring, warns the report. Despite presenting no policy documents to the investigation, Aberdeen City Council, for instance, reported that 60 different techniques had been used to “physically intervene with children”.

So chaotic is the overall picture that children’s commissioner Bruce Adamson wants all schools to stop using seclusion and restraint, as a matter of urgency, until national guidelines and standards are put in place.

The commissioner acknowledges that there “may be times when the use of restraint or seclusion is a necessary response, as a measure of last resort to prevent harm to a child or to others”.

But parents of disabled children argue that in some schools it is a first resort - and is being used not only to keep children safe, but also to discipline them.

One parent - who has been campaigning since 2015 for improved national guidance on restraint and seclusion after her son was restrained in his special school - argues that despite corporal punishment being banned in Scottish schools more than 30 years ago, failures in guidance and scrutiny have allowed some schools to “reintroduce it illicitly” (see box, page 17).

Only 18 of Scotland’s 32 local authorities were able to provide data to the investigation on the number of incidents of physical intervention that had taken place in their schools last year (school year 2017-18).

In total, 2,674 incidents took place across the 18 authorities, but only 13 recorded the number of children who were subject to those interventions.

So based on the authorities that reported both sets of data, an average of 5.86 incidents were recorded for each child that was on the receiving end of such interventions - showing that the same children are being subjected to them time and time again.

The figures suggest that disabled children experienced restraint and seclusion more than their peers, says the report, but poor recording and limited data make it hard to draw conclusions, it adds.

It should be the case, according to Hobbs, that if a child is restrained a number of times in the course of a school year, alarm bells should start ringing. But because statistics are not always collected, such triggers often do not exist.

Adamson says his office decided to carry out the investigation after being sent photographs of “injuries alleged to have been sustained at school” by disabled children. They had also heard about children being regularly restrained in front of other children and of “the terrible loss of dignity” for the children restrained and placed in seclusion, “who sometimes become so distressed they soil themselves”.

In the report, a pupil of secondary age describes their experience of being restrained. The child derides school as being “mince” and refers to the “bad teachers”, saying they had hurt him on the floor, made him feel dizzy and had not allowed him to go to the toilet. “It’s not good to pee on the floor and it was wet on my trousers,” the child writes.

A parent, meanwhile, talks about her five-year-old child, who had a mental age of 3, becoming “traumatised” and “distraught” after being locked in a cloakroom at school.

Teachers are becoming increasingly vocal about their struggle to meet the needs of all the pupils in their classes, at a time when support-staff numbers are falling due to local authority budget cuts. They talk about their frustration at having to deliver “inclusion on the cheap” and say that children’s needs are not being met. Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS, wants to see better-funded inclusion, smaller class sizes and more “nurturing” spaces in schools that could offer sanctuary to pupils when they find the classroom environment overwhelming.

One primary teacher who wrote an anonymous letter to education secretary John Swinney earlier this year, which attracted considerable attention when Conservative leader Ruth Davidson referred to it in Parliament in October, said the situation had “reached crisis level”, and talked about having to evacuate her class “on more than one occasion, while one of my children trashed the classroom”.

The report does not point the finger of blame at teachers. Rather, it calls for “clear and consistent policies and procedures” to be published by the government and for local authorities to provide training to staff.

Adamson describes it as “shameful that teachers are being left to try to manage behaviours without adequate training and support”.

He adds: “Use of seclusion and isolation to manage behaviour in schoolchildren was a clear topic for the office’s first investigation, but we were surprised by a complete lack of consistency across authorities. Some authorities record incidents, but have no guidelines; some have guidelines, but cannot tell us how often they use the procedure.

“More worrying, there are no standards to identify what we mean by isolation and seclusion, yet we have heard from young people, their parents and carers how these are used as punishment, without an understanding of needs or care for individuals. Clear and consistent policies and procedures are urgently needed, along with clear examples of good practice.”

The report makes 21 recommendations, including that no restraint or seclusion take place in the absence of clear, consistent policies and procedures at local authority level to govern its use; the Scottish government should publish a national policy and guidance on restraint and seclusion in schools, and involve children in its development; local authorities should record all incidents of restraint and seclusion in schools on a common national form and the data should be collected, published and analysed by government; and parents should be informed as soon as possible following an incident.

The report also calls for Education Scotland and the Care Inspectorate to scrutinise the use of restraint and seclusion in schools, as part of their inspection regimes, and suggests that the key to avoiding a crisis is good planning. It further urges schools to work with children and their families when risk assessing, pointing out that one way to avert a crisis is to “first know the child”.

While the investigation identified good examples of risk assessment involving the child, “few indicate that any discussion has taken place with parents or carers”. This is a missed opportunity “to obtain helpful information about triggers and strategies which could potentially mitigate the risk of a situation escalating significantly”, says the report. It adds: “What is certain is that good planning, based on a better understanding of the child and their particular needs, and with the involvement of both parents and carers and the child in planning, is one of the most effective tools available to schools.”

The Scottish government, councils, Education Scotland and the Care Inspectorate now have until the end of January to respond to the report - and to heed the “urgent” call for clear policies that would prevent children like M and their brother being traumatised by an education system that should be their making.

Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

Restraint and seclusion ‘still being used as a punishment’

Beth Morrison has been campaigning for national guidance on restraint and seclusion in schools since her son, Calum, was restrained at the age of 11 by four adults in a special school.

Calum, who has epilepsy and learning disabilities, had kicked out at a teacher who had removed him from a bike he had been riding in the gym hall.

He was restrained, face down, on the floor and urinated while being held, before being put in a “time-out chair” in his wet clothes.

When he went home, Calum had multiple bruises on his arms and legs, as well as abrasions to his spine.

He also had widespread petechial haemorrhaging on his upper chest and his lips were blue, says Morrison.

Calum is now an adult, but Morrison continues to fight for national guidance on restraint and seclusion in schools, arguing that they are a first-resort and “daily occurrence” in some schools, where they are used to discipline children, as opposed to preventing them from being harmed.

In 2015, she petitioned the Scottish government. A year later, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child recommended that isolation rooms and restraint for disciplinary purposes be abolished in the UK.

In a letter earlier this year to the petitions committee, Morrison said feedback from more than 400 parents and carers across Scotland showed that restraint and seclusion was “still being used as a punishment for many children, particularly in mainstream” where “there’s not enough support for children with additional needs”.

CYPCS definitions

Restraint: Holding a child or young person to restrict their movement. It includes mechanical restraints - for instance, wheelchair straps - but not those used during the course of normal activities or transportation, for instance, seatbelts or wheelchair harnesses.

Seclusion: The confinement of a child, without their consent, by shutting them alone in a room or other area from which they are prevented from leaving. Seclusion is not the same as a “time out”, which is defined as a behavioural intervention used as part of a structured behaviour-support plan that does not necessarily involve being physically removed to a separate room or area.

Beefed-up powers lead to investigation

The children’s commissioner’s power to investigate breaches of children’s rights was enhanced in 2014.

Previously, the commissioner was able to carry out an investigation where a particular group of children and young people, such as those attending the same school, or a broader group of children and young people - including all those with disabilities - told him they believed their rights were not being respected.

The change in law, however, has allowed the commissioner to investigate cases affecting individual children and young people; it also led to the introduction of a complaints and investigation service.

Following the set-up of the new team, the office conducted an assessment of possible issues to investigate and identified restraint and seclusion as the first priority for investigation.

It is the first investigation to be carried out by the commissioner since the role was established in Scotland over a decade ago.