Would you design a public service that was only suitable for two-thirds of its prospective users?
Angela Morgan, who carried out the 2020 support-for-learning review, is asking the question.
“If we were to design any public service in any sphere of social policy, would we design a public service that met the needs of around two-thirds - or that we hoped would meet the needs of around two-thirds? What would we be doing with the other third?”
But that is how Scottish state schools - where more than one-third of pupils have additional support needs (ASN) - are being run, she says, because of the narrow focus on exam results and literacy and numeracy attainment, and “this idea that somehow you can do this supplementary bit of tweaking” for a third of children.
“It’s not working, and it’s not going to work,” says Morgan.
She believes it is “time to deal with the reality of how life is” and for Scottish schools to undergo a “radical redesign” so that all pupils can thrive. The focus should be on “building relationships” and “learning for life”, with a multi-agency approach taken - and parents working in partnership with schools.
“The reality is that children’s learning ability is tied to what they are experiencing at home, and everybody knows that,” Morgan says.
She adds that success should be measured not by the number of exams passed - although she acknowledges that qualifications will always be important - but by how much pupils have developed based on “the child’s own individual starting point”.
“When we start to hear politicians and we see reports in the media of equivalent celebration alongside exam results, then we will be getting somewhere,” says Morgan.
It is also, she explains, time to drop the “additional” from additional support needs.
School inclusion for pupils with additional support needs
Language is “pernicious”, says Morgan, and the use of the word “additional” has “implications of cost and burden” when the children categorised in this way want to be known for “their strengths and their interests”.
“When we get to 50 per cent [of pupils with ASN], are we still calling it additional support?” she asks.
Morgan points out that when she carried out her review of how well Scotland’s additional-support-for-learning legislation was being implemented, she dropped the word “additional”, calling it Support for Learning: All our Children and All their Potential.
However, the problem is not just that children with ASN are floundering in the current system. As Morgan’s 2020 report highlighted: implementation of Scotland’s “ground-breaking, rights-widening legislation” was “over-dependent on committed individuals”, “fragmented” and “inconsistent”.
High rates of school absence have persisted well beyond the Covid lockdowns that forced schools to shut. And we have had the recent “alarming narrative about aggression and violence in schools” also telling us “that our design is not right”.
So, how do we make change happen?
Morgan says she met with those leading the ongoing Hayward review of qualifications and assessment and found this “very encouraging...the way their thinking was going”. The group’s interim report in March recommended less focus on exams and a “Scottish Diploma of Achievement” that would record more than just academic attainment. Its final report is expected to be with the government by the end of May.
In general terms, Morgan says the key to successful change is to start with “an agreed vision so it is taken away from all of our stakeholder interests”, and “work outwards from that”.
But she warns: “You can’t just shuffle the cards and call things different names. This is too often what happens and it’s a complete waste of time.”
So the assessment review may bear fruit, but it is three years since Morgan submitted her own review and already some of its recommendations have been thrown out by the government.
At the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association conference in Crieff, which begins on Friday, delegates will vote on a motion calling for “the Scottish government to ensure that all teachers are given appropriate training in additional support needs education”.
The motion highlights the growing number of pupils, and adds “yet the majority of ASN teachers supporting these pupils have little to no training or formal qualifications”.
A teaching qualification in ASN
Morgan recommended “a first teaching qualification in additional support needs” being made available to student teachers. But in an update on the Morgan review - published in November - the government said that it had held discussions with the General Teaching Council for Scotland and the Scottish Council of Deans of Education, and the conclusion was that a qualification in additional support for learning “would not be attractive to those considering a career in teaching”; student teachers needed to experience “the full spectrum of school teaching during initial teacher education and probation”. It added: “Only at this stage will they be able to make an informed judgement on specialising in additional support for learning.”
But Bernadette Casey, a special-school headteacher and president of primary leaders’ body AHDS, told Tes Scotland last year that special schools like hers “don’t get students and we don’t get probationers”. She said there was a lack of exposure to the sector, which, if addressed, could benefit teachers irrespective of where their careers took them.
“I know there are all kinds of things vying for a place in initial teacher education, but ASN affects everybody - teachers will come into mainstream classes and they will have children with a variety of additional support needs - and just being in a more specialist environment gives you different strategies that you can use, as well as more experience and understanding,” she said.
“We had two temporary teachers last year who came from mainstream, and both of them said they wished they had known in mainstream what they had learned with us. That was a telling moment for me.”
Ask Morgan if she feels that much progress has been made since the publication of her review and she says the pandemic was “obviously a massive factor”. She sensed “an openness” and “a window of opportunity” at the point when the review was being submitted, but Covid hit almost as soon as it was handed to John Swinney, the education secretary at the time, and “it was nobody’s fault that all of that was thrown immediately off course”.
She is also clear, however, that not addressing failings in the system could spell the end of inclusion - a policy that teachers generally say they support but that they want to be properly resourced.
Morgan says: “The risk is that the response to things not working is that we end up with a swing back to an institutional model for those children that don’t fit - the ones that don’t tick the boxes and don’t succeed. You know, ‘Let’s build a shiny new school for them.’ I worry about that.”
All of which begs this question: if the idea of inclusion is crucial because it demonstrates that all people are valued and respected, what does it say about Scottish education if it fails?
Emma Seith is senior reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith
