How long would it take to plough through Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear? Now add another 20,000 words to Shakespeare’s four great tragedies and you’ve matched the volume of evidence that mounted up when MSPs canvassed views on additional support needs (ASN).
The resultant 244-page document is the largest that TESS has seen go before a Holyrood committee; its sheer scale hints at the turmoil around ASN. Politicians are even beginning to question the sustainability of inclusion - a defining policy of Scottish education in recent times.
The document builds a comprehensive picture of an impending crisis. By now, many of the statistics it contains are familiar: almost a quarter of pupils are designated ASN, while in 2003 the figure was fewer than one in 20. Yet staffing is going the other way: there has been a 15 per cent reduction in teachers with a specialism in ASN for learning since 2009. The number of ASN care or auxiliary assistants is down by 10 per cent since 2007.
Saying a child has additional support needs certainly doesn’t mean that child is getting additional support
Professor Sheila Riddell, director of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research in Education Inclusion and Diversity, neatly summed up the paradox of vastly more children being recorded as ASN. “Saying a child has additional support needs certainly doesn’t mean that child is getting additional support,” she told the Scottish Parliament’s education and skills committee.
Her sober analysis came after MSPs read repeated cries of anguish - in submissions from teachers and parents - about the realities of ASN. Johann Lamont, a former teacher and Scottish Labour leader, claimed that the problems were not limited to a minority of cases, but seemed to be endemic.
The 244 pages also lay bare how dauntingly broad the term ASN is: teachers might have pupils with motor impairments, Down’s syndrome or dyslexia; children might be blind, deaf or in a wheelchair; and young people may be looked after, adopted or homeless.
“We just don’t have enough resources and training to deal with this,” secondary teacher Samreen Shah told the committee.
Focus groups taking part in the inquiry said that teachers felt like they were failing children - and that the situation was getting worse each year. One teacher, Phillip Mathis, said that it was “frightening to feel that you cannot possibly meet the needs of every child in your class, no matter how hard you try”.
Lorna Walker, a former schools inspector specialising in ASN, said that school staff were “desperate for guidance”.
Ms Riddell also viewed ASN training as “very, very patchy in Scotland”.
Comedic response
A defining moment of the inquiry came when, to widespread disbelief online, Sylvia Haughney, an experienced support-for-learning instructor, recalled a staff member being advised to learn about Asperger’s syndrome by watching sitcom The Big Bang Theory, which has a character widely believed to be autistic. While the context for that advice was unclear, it echoed a focus group with student teachers, which had revealed that, having received no relevant training, a teacher might have to resort to googling common conditions, such as autism.
Many teachers are telling the EIS that behaviour management is their biggest difficulty and that they do not feel safe at work, the union’s written evidence to the inquiry stated. ASN teachers can experience “serious violence” from pupils, it said, including being bitten, spat on and scratched. Yet while the EIS continues to back the principle of mainstreaming pupils where appropriate, many staff are less supportive. One anonymous submission from a pupil-support assistant read: “The majority of children in mainstream education are having their learning disrupted by ASN children and it is time for this to stop.
“Bring back more special-education facilities and let the majority of children get the education they deserve.”
Such comments expose a tension, with some parents and academics seeing a different problem: that teachers often fail to understand or embrace inclusion. A pointed submission from the University of Glasgow’s School of Education suggested that, while some are “responding in creative, innovative and enthusiastic ways to create classrooms that include a wide range of learners”, others have “a very narrow view of inclusion”. It cited teachers’ social media discussions that focus on problems rather than solutions, such as class sizes, budget cuts and “a perceived rise in disruptive behaviour”.
In a similar vein, a parent of a daughter with Down’s syndrome recalled encountering a deputy headteacher at a mainstream secondary school who was “highly insensitive and demonstrated that he did not ‘get’ inclusion” when he “clearly [tried] to put us off” by saying the girl would be “the most learning-disabled child ever to attend the school”. A staff member at the school, responsible for co-ordinating support for learning, said that “my daughter attending could take away support from another child… an outrageous thing to say”.
‘Terrified’ of school
The picture is not uniform across Scotland, however. Riddell is concerned by the “considerable variation in identification of need”. In Aberdeenshire, for example, 39 per cent of pupils are classified as ASN, compared with 9.2 per cent in neighbouring Angus. One special-needs teacher said that some schools in her authority were “doing really great work and others are floundering in the dark”.
Parents also told some horrendous stories. One 11-year-old girl was “terrified” to go to school because of a boy with additional needs who had threatened to snap her neck, and who had told another girl that he would wait under her bed to stab her and her family.
One 11-year-old girl was “terrified” to go to school because of a boy with additional needs who had threatened to snap her neck, and who had told another girl that he would wait under her bed to stab her and her family
Yet for all the outpouring of bad news, MSPs also heard inclusion success stories. One parent of two boys, Lyndsey Emmett-Liddle, said: “I am fully supportive of learning support within schools… My oldest son went on to become top of his class due to the support, structure and strategies given within school.”
But MSPs heard enough to question the very principle of inclusion. The Scottish Green Party MSP Ross Greer and Conservative Liz Smith were among those exploring whether inclusion was fundamentally flawed or simply hamstrung by a lack of money.
No one of political influence is yet calling for the reversal of inclusion, even if many teachers feel that things are at breaking point. But Riddell has read the runes and sees a threat. It would be easy for “learning support to be quietly whittled away”, she says, with the result that more pupils would be sent to specialist schools, whether it’s the best place for them or not.
Whatever one’s view of ASN, the succinct assessment by one parent who contacted the education committee is disputed by almost no one: “We can do so much better.”
