Scotland’s new inquiry into additional support needs opened today with pleas for more money and more staff in schools, amid surging demand for specialist ASN provision.
MSPs were told that the “explosion” in the number of ASN pupils over the past 20 years had not remotely been matched by resources in schools, and that while the “presumption of mainstreaming” is laudable in theory, it has often placed huge pressure on schools lacking the capacity to make it work.
The Additional Support for Learning Inquiry was convened two decades on from the seminal 2004 ASL Act that fundamentally changed Scotland’s approach in this area - most strikingly in terms of the number of pupils recognised as having ASN. Formerly a relatively small minority, annual statistics in December showed that, in 2023, 37 per cent of all pupils (259,036 in total) had an additional support need.
Susan Quinn, convener of the EIS teaching union’s education committee and a primary headteacher, told MSPs today that the needs of many pupils in mainstream schools - who would have been educated elsewhere in the past - “are not being met” and that large class sizes and the growing number of pupils with complex needs in these schools were militating against the potential benefits of mainstreaming.
Another expert witness to address the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee today was the School Leaders Scotland president Peter Bain, a joint secondary and primary headteacher, who said lack of training in additional needs was another significant problem.
He also cautioned that, for the presumption of mainstreaming to work, the education system had to become more flexible so that, for example, learners could start school later in the day or older pupils could do some of their learning in workplaces.
‘Explosion’ in ASN numbers
Mr Bain said that the “explosion” in the number of pupils with ASN was often felt most acutely around those with “mid-range issues”. While the specialist support for those with highly complex needs might be in place, peers with less severe difficulties frequently did not get the expert help they needed and the level of support across different schools was “inconsistent”.
He expressed sympathy for local authorities’ “plight” as they contend with growing ASN demand at a time when council budgets are badly stretched.
Mike Corbett, Scotland national official for the NASUWT teaching union, also described the rise in ASN pupils - their numbers more than doubled between 2012 and 2022 - as an “explosion” and called for more support from the likes of Education Scotland and the regional improvement collaboratives.
Sylvia Haughney, education convener of the Unison union’s Glasgow branch, said that schools for pupils with particularly complex needs were “filled to capacity” but that their staff were not required to do specialised training.
In practice, this meant that teachers were often being trained on the job by support staff in how to help pupils with highly complex needs to, for example, communicate that they wanted to go to the toilet.
“Children in ASN establishments should have the right to that specialised teaching,” she said.
‘Lottery’ of specialist training
Ms Haughney also called for mandatory training of support for learning staff in mainstream schools.
She said that staff in coffee shops such as Costa got mandatory training in how to use their machines, yet it was possible for people working with vulnerable children to have had no basic training.
“There is an abundance of training out there, but it’s down to the leadership of individual schools as to whether support staff can access any of that training - and it’s a lottery,” she said.
She stressed that crucial workers, such as speech and language therapists and educational psychologists, were often thin on the ground. In one area she was familiar with, the ratio of educational psychologists to pupils was nearly 700:1.
“We are cutting teacher numbers but we are also also cutting everything that holds [the] system up,” she said.
Mr Bain said it was difficult for schools to find time for ASN training: the five annual in-service days were already largely accounted for and, of the 195 annual “collegiate” hours in teachers’ working-time agreement, there might be only 20 hours to work with, into which schools might also have to squeeze departmental work as well as, for example, discussions around careers standards, developing the young workforce and the impact of artificial intelligence - leaving perhaps five hours for ASN, “if you’re lucky”.
‘Problematic’ emphasis on attainment
Today’s witnesses also shared a view that the sea change in how additional needs are defined had not been matched by a fundamental shift in how success in schools is ultimately measured.
“The emphasis on attainment over achievement is problematic,” said Ms Quinn, who was critical of Scotland’s system of standardised national assessments. She also pointed to the annual “celebration of [Scottish Qualifications Authority] results day” each August, and the focus on traditional SQA qualifications such as Highers, but “not other qualifications and achievements”.
“We haven’t, as a country, found a way to get over that,” she said.
That view was echoed by Matthew Cavanagh - representing the ASN committee of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association - who said that the heavy emphasis on established forms of attainment “needs to be challenged massively”.
Meanwhile, Mr Bain said that it was not right to treat ASN pupils as a “discrete group”, separate from other learners, especially as they now formed such a large proportion of the national school roll.
“We need to re-evaluate our ideology behind the concept of inclusion and the support in classrooms that’s required,” he said.
The ASN situation was also not helped by general stasis around education reform in Scotland, according to Mr Bain, who said it would help schools if work began on even half of the 26 recommendations in the 2023 Hayward report, particularly on key innovations such as the Scottish Diploma of Achievement.
Mr Bain said that, after a flurry of reports about the future of Scottish education, momentum had been lost: “We’re sitting about - we don’t know where we’re going.”
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