Thank you for inviting me.
Allow me to clarify my status. I was the independent chair of the review between October 2019 and February 2020. I submitted the report with its findings and recommendations at the end of February. That was the end of my involvement. I am not involved with or employed by any of the bodies that are responsible for implementation. I am here as the former independent chair, and I am very pleased to be here.
I will highlight the main points of the review. First, it is clear that there is no fundamental deficit in the principles and policy of the legislation and guidance, some of which is very good. The challenge is in its implementation for thousands of children and young people in Scotland.
I was asked to chair the review because there is recognition of the fact that there is a problem. Nonetheless, I found many dedicated, skilled and inspiring professionals who are enormously committed to children and young people who have additional challenges. I found that the system is overly dependent on those individuals, and it is fragmented and inconsistent.
One of the main things that emerged, for me, is that additional support for learning is not visible and is not equally valued within Scotland’s education system. It is dealt with as an afterthought, which creates a great deal of the difficulty that arises.
Secondly, there has been an increase in need over the past number of years, and changes in recording should be borne in mind, but the most recent figures show that almost 31 per cent of children in our schools are identified as having an additional support need under the legislation. My challenge to that—which I say a lot about in the report—is about the need to review and redefine what mainstream education should look like in that context, when so many children and young people are identified as having additional support needs. The events of the past eight months will also have had an impact.
Thirdly, a narrow definition of learning has developed. It has become focused on education and, within that, on attainment and exams. However, if we look at the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004 and at the definition in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the key concept is that of learning for life. That goes beyond the child’s life at school, into their home and into their future. That is another factor that underpins the difficulty that I found.
Culture, leadership and mindset are key. I return to my point that visibility and value are not what they should be. The legislation is internationally recognised but, in practice, additional support is consistently seen as an afterthought in policy and discussion. That has even been the case in the past months of planning for dealing with the pandemic.
That has a number of consequences, such as a lack of recognition that some groups of children are eligible for support under the legislation, and competition between children and groups. That is nobody’s fault and is certainly not the fault of the children and their parents; it is a consequence of pressures.
Resources were not an area for me to look at, but it was not credible to write the report without commenting on them. Given the increase in need and the pressures on public bodies’ finances in past years, which we all know about, resources are an issue, which is why I made a recommendation to Audit Scotland.
The resources situation means that other public bodies are struggling to play their part. I talked about learning for life, which goes beyond education and applies across local authority provision and to partner bodies including health services and community services. There are issues with accessibility and the thresholds that are presented to children and young people, and there are issues for school staff who seek to access partner input.
Complex challenges underpin the difficulties for children and young people and for teachers, who want to work positively with them. I return to my earlier point that there is a challenge in that we look at individual children or individual groups of need rather than at a systemic problem.
I found a general recognition and acceptance of an embedded and difficult problem that is a bit of a cycle of despair—it involves the ability to define needs and a challenge in deciding what to do, which is why I shaped the recommendations around levers. That will bring the issue into the sphere of political and public debate, which will keep it visible, demand difficult and challenging conversations with high-level leadership about accepting the difficulties, and require honest discussion with parents, children and teaching staff. Having seen the commitment and care from staff in schools and from other staff, I know that there is enthusiasm to develop such an approach. I hope that that is enough, as a starting point.