Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee, 16 Sep 2009

Meeting date: Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Official Report 158KB pdf

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Petition

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Autism Spectrum Disorder (PE1213)

Item 2 is the committee's continued consideration of petition PE1213. The petition has been brought back on our agenda following a response from the minister to the committee's letter and following the conclusion of our consideration of the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Bill. In advance of today's meeting, members will have received a paper from the clerks recommending that the petition now be closed—they try that all the time, but whether they are allowed to do that is another matter. Do members have any comments?

If I may say so, the minister's response provides a very full and helpful reminder of the changes that we have passed through the original ASL bill and the recent ASL reform bill. However, I want to make two points about the response.

The petition has two parts. First, it refers to the "diagnosis and appeals procedures", which the minister's response partially covers—I might come back to that. Secondly, it urges the Government to consider

"whether all the support that is necessary within the education system is in place to support children diagnosed with ASD",

but the minister's response does not refer to that at all. As I have mentioned on previous occasions—including just recently when we discussed our work programme—my worry is that current budgetary pressures are resulting in schools cutting ASL. With schools losing classroom support, special needs auxiliaries and classroom assistants, many children who decided to enter a mainstream school because they would receive such support are now finding difficulties. They are struggling because support is not available.

I am conscious that the committee has spent a lot of time on the issue, but I do not think that the minister's response addresses it and I find it difficult to access the information. For example, it is difficult to get a grasp of how much of the financial support that we have directed through budgets is available in the classroom. It is difficult to know how much of the additional money—including the £10 million for ASL in the Scottish National Party's manifesto and, I think, in the original budget—has gone through to teachers and classroom assistants. At the very least, I would like to hear the minister's thoughts on the support that is available in the classroom, as opposed to the legal processes and the rights that children have been given.

The second issue is more immediate. Since the minister's letter—or perhaps while he was writing it—the process of amending the equivalent legislation in England and Wales has begun and an appeals process for children with special needs is being introduced. Such children will be able to appeal directly to the special educational needs and disability tribunal in England and Wales. We did not think about such a provision when we considered the recent ASL bill, but the minister might wish to give some consideration to that matter.

On both those points, we should at the very least write back to the minister. We should keep the petition open until we have an answer.

On Ken Macintosh's first point, my thoughts are basically the same. I agree that the minister's response is very good on the different aspects of what has been done, but he does not give much detail on the actual levels of support and on what is happening across the country. I might feel slightly different about the issue if local government funding was heading into a boom period, but I suspect that we are heading into a time when council funding will be significantly stretched. It would be good for us to have at least a greater understanding of what the support levels are currently. We could also get the minister's thoughts on what safeguards might be put in place to ensure that councils protect such services, given that we are hearing from around the country that councils do not always do so. I feel that that aspect is not given as much weight as the other issues in the minister's response. I consider the minister's letter to be a good response because it provides a lot of good information, but we should take up the point about the levels of support that are currently available and that might be available when councils and the Government confront the difficulties that they are about to face.

I think that a slight issue behind the petition is how schools deal with additional support for learning as opposed to some of the behavioural difficulties that might result from the need for such support. I understand that that is one reason why the petition was lodged in the first place. There is a concern about the procedures by which such matters are dealt with. I understand that, in some councils, decisions about the educational provision are taken by different people from the ones who take decisions about exclusion or discipline policy. I would welcome a chance to ask the minister about that. This is a very complex and difficult area, but I think that that issue probably lies behind the petition. From what I understand, this is quite a complex case.

I thought that the minister provided a detailed response, which was welcome. It was obvious that he had reflected on much that is in the petition. Like other members, I am not sure that we should close the petition at this stage, not least because the committee will conduct an inquiry into the funding of education and children's services through local authorities. We might want to keep the petition open until we have completed that work, because there might be issues that we will follow up as part of the inquiry.

There are wider issues to do with autism. The Autism Bill is going through Westminster. England, Wales and Northern Ireland have autism strategies, but we do not have such a strategy in Scotland. I am not saying that we definitely need a strategy, but we need to explore the reasons for the slightly different approach in Scotland and consider whether there is scope for improvement. Given that there is a little flexibility in our timetable, do members think that it would be worth having a brief one-off meeting to take evidence on general issues to do with autism, at the end of which we would get the minister in to answer questions? That would tie in with the petition.

We all come across constituency cases that cause concern. It would be a good idea to explore some of the issues. We should invite representatives from a couple of local authorities to the evidence-taking meeting, so that we can ask how front-line services are being delivered. I represent a region, so I have the benefit of being able to interact with several local authorities and to identify differences in service delivery—there is a bit of a patchwork. It would be good to pin down some of the issues at local authority level.

It is vital that we hear from local authorities, because they are at the front line and they must make tough decisions that impact on the people whom we represent. We should hear from all stakeholders. If we are so minded, the clerks can come back to us on that. We can advise the petitioner of the committee's deliberations today.