Official Report 288KB pdf
I ask Gillian Baxendine to update us on the inquiry into special educational needs.
The Scottish Parliament information centre has been considering on-going work in this area and has offered to provide a short paper for the next meeting. The paper will suggest how our inquiry could fit into work that the Executive is conducting and into the Executive's time scale. The inquiry might be more usefully discussed in the context of that paper.
I suggest that we put that item on the agenda for next week. We do not want to find that we are out of sync with the Riddell report or that we are duplicating work that has already been undertaken as recently as the past three to six months. If we receive a paper from SPICe that updates us on that work, we will be able to decide how to progress the inquiry.
Do we have any information from the Executive on whether it intends to delay its consideration of the Riddell report? Although the report was four months late, the Executive did not alter the consultation period.
I understand that the Executive has just finished its consultation exercise and will consider the comments received. It is expected that the Executive will proceed with the recommendations, as suitably amended in the light of that consultation. It would be open to the committee to take up that matter with the Executive.
We should not forget that the Riddell report and the subject of special educational needs are mutually inclusive. Did the committee discuss at the previous meeting the appointment of a special adviser, which Mike Russell raised at the meeting before that?
We did not discuss the special adviser, but we will include that in next week's discussion, should we decide to proceed with the inquiry—the committee will have to make that decision.