There were nine asks in our report. We had a meeting with the cabinet secretary, who was warm and nice, and he took the issue seriously. He agreed to commission a round-table discussion on the issue of initial teacher education, which took place last week. All the key players were invited, such as the General Teaching Council for Scotland, the Educational Institute of Scotland, the Scottish Council of Deans of Education and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. Together, we explored whether we can do more initial teacher education in autism. It was an interesting discussion. It started off with people saying, “Well, if we are going to have training in autism, what about all the other issues that people might need to be trained in? How will we fit everything in?” However, we got to a place where there was an acceptance that, because of a number of different issues—the prevalence of autism, the seriousness of incidents and the fact that autism is different from other additional support needs, in that it is part of someone’s identity and is a holistic condition about who someone is and how the brain functions—there was some work to do.
The cabinet secretary has agreed to form a working group with us and the Scottish Council of Deans of Education to explore the issue. That is very positive. The representative from the Scottish Council of Deans of Education accepted a couple of things that we have talked about today. For example, he accepted that there could be greater standardisation of what initial teacher education in autism looks like and that we could perhaps work on figuring out what that baseline could be. That is important, because Education Scotland was saying that part of the problem that it has is that it deals with teachers who have all got vastly different experiences, and it is not clear what level of experience each one has. We are grateful for what the cabinet secretary has done in that regard.
The downside is that our other main asks have not been answered. We sent a letter about that and we did not get what I consider to be an adequate response. I have to say that the response to our calls seemed a bit copy-and-pasted, which was disappointing, given that the letter was signed by 3,000 of our supporters.
We are happy that the issue of teacher training in autism is being addressed. However, the issue of stopping the unlawful exclusions has not been addressed. There has not been progress on that or any acceptance that the ability to do that rests with Government. We have asked for those exclusions to be formally recorded, so that we at least have an idea of the data and an understanding of the extent to which that is happening. That has not been agreed to yet, which is a shame, but we will continue to engage with the Government on the issue.
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The other issue that has not been engaged with is the need to improve the numbers and availability of specialist teachers in the education system. The answer that we got was that the overall number of teachers has increased. That is great—we love it—but we would like more information about specialist teachers and would like to work constructively with the Government on what it means to be a specialist teacher and how we can ensure that we have a gold-standard quality of specialist teacher, so that, no matter what school your child goes to, you know that the additional support needs teacher has a certain level of expertise and will be able to support your child well.
We are pleased with the progress that has been made and we thank the Government for that, but there is still a lot to do.