Experts on the education experiences of children with additional support needs (ASN) in Scotland are warning that pupils from less affluent backgrounds are missing out on support in school, because middle-class parents are better equipped to “battle”, “fight” and “argue” to get help.

The representatives from the third sector and a teaching union warned that there is “a social-justice issue” in terms of the support children with ASN are getting in school and that the current system “favours middle class people”.

Speaking at the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee meeting this morning, Nick Ward, director of the National Autistic Society Scotland, said parents were having to “fight tooth and nail” to get appropriate support if their child has ASN. But that means that, all too often, working-class children and families are being left behind.

Quick read: ‘Have support-staff numbers dropped? Who knows?’

Long read: You could fill a book with how ASN is going wrong

The stats: Legally-binding ASN plans ‘in terminal decline’

He said: “Actually we have a system that favours middle-class people and parents arguing and fighting - and, if it was my child, I would be fighting and arguing and going mad as well. But they should not have to do that.

“We should have a system that says, ‘This is what we think.’ We should have a proactive system that is offering support because actually that won’t then just happen to the middle-class kids or parents - that will also happen to the working-class parents as well.

ASN: Mainstreaming ‘must be properly funded’

“There’s a social justice issue there that we don’t talk about enough that maybe should also be addressed.”

The panel - which also included Seamus Searson, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, and Kayleigh Thorpe, head of campaigns, policy and activism at Enable, the learning disability charity - said it agreed with the mainstreaming policy but argued that it had to be properly funded, with more consistent experiences between local authorities.  

They painted a picture of an education system where special needs children and their parents were being regularly let down, where unlawful exclusions were “happening all the time” and parents at the end of their tether were being forced to home educate their children because their local school could not cope with their needs.

Mr Ward said the “abhorrent situation” had been created where, to secure expensive specialist placements, children and their families had to go through the “traumatic experience” of failing in mainstream first.

He added: “We are a membership organisation and what we hear time and time again is that with the presumption of mainstreaming, what that means in reality, sadly, for so many families is that they have to fight tooth and nail to get the appropriate placement for their child.

“What we have actually done is we have perversely created a system where a child has to fail in a mainstream school to get the specialist place they require because local authorities don’t want to pay for it. That is an absolutely abhorrent situation because what you have got - when it comes to our members - is autistic children and families who are being set up for a series of traumatic experiences all to get their child to the place they need to be.

“Now that’s not fair on the family or the child and on the teachers because teachers don’t deserve to have that situation happening to them. They deserve to have the training and the skills to cope with it or they deserve for that child to be in the most appropriate setting and not for them to have to mess up in their classroom.”

However, Ms Thorpe cautioned against viewing “bricks and mortar as the solution”. Some of the specialist skill available in other settings could be brought into mainstream schools, she said.

She said: “It’s about how we take that specialism and that specialist knowledge and that specialist expertise and insert it because the success stories we hear are where a person has made a difference - it’s not about where a setting has made a difference. There are children that will benefit from a specialist placement but that’s not the black-and-white solution when something is not going right in mainstream.”