Hansard

I remind members that I am the parliamentary liaison officer for the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills.

As we have heard, the presumption of mainstreaming is now well enshrined in Scottish educational discourse, but it was not always like that. We have talked about putting the child at the centre, but the political culture and, conversely, the educational culture were not always like that. In my lifetime, teachers were still legally able to belt pupils. In fact, at the last school in which I taught, a framed tawse adorned the staffroom wall. “In Emergency Break Glass” read the instruction below it.

When we talk about inclusive education and meeting the needs of all, we should be cognisant of the importance of school culture. The downward trajectory of exclusion rates is good news but, to my knowledge, the Government does not currently gather records of internal exclusions, which take place under the radar, as it were. Those exclusions involve sending a pupil out of the classroom to the cooler or the sin bin, as I have heard it called. I hope that the Government will consider directly collecting that data, particularly from our secondary schools, as part of its consultation.

I will give members an example of a pupil whom I taught. In first year, Jamie was the class clown: he mucked about, he got the laughs and he was often sent out. Jamie also had a pretty complex range of additional support needs, but he loved the debating part of modern studies. He was bright and he was switched on. On the writing part, however, Jamie was not convinced. He struggled and struggled, and he would then give up.

Jamie’s writing capabilities as a secondary 1 pupil were where we would expect a primary 1 pupil’s writing abilities to be. I did my best as a teacher in a class with 30 12-year-olds in front of me, but it was not easy. The class had a learning support assistant, but a number of other children in the class had additional support needs, too.

I often passed Jamie sitting outside the deputy head’s office with a textbook and a jotter in front of him, doodling away. When I asked him why he was out of class, I was invariably told that he had had a run-in with a teacher. For Jamie, it was a kick to get sent out of class and to see his classmates’ faces light up with glee when he challenged the natural power and balance that existed in the classroom, but he got bored quickly. He would swing on the plastic chair, which, in turn, incurred the wrath of teachers, such as me, because he might—heaven forbid—snap the plastic.

I did not know much about Jamie’s home life—that information was not regularly shared with classroom teachers, and it was certainly never shared by email due to its confidential nature. Instead, the gatekeepers of confidential information—the guidance department—would hurriedly ask the staff who taught Jamie to gather around at the end of break to get an update.

It transpired that Jamie’s parents had separated. The nature of what had happened meant that he and his siblings could not stay at home anymore, so they were all farmed out—some went to grandparents miles away, and some went into care. Teachers were only told about what had happened to him four weeks later.

That 12-year-old boy, who was managing to get himself to class, was kicking off to get the attention in school that he was not getting at home. Despite the school knowing that, Jamie would sit—sometimes for weeks on end—outside the deputy head’s office with his jotter and his textbook, doodling away, deprived of his right to education and not having his additional support needs met. There was not a belt, a tawse or a set of lines in sight; nevertheless, Jamie was being punished. The chaos that he experienced at home contrasted with his teachers’ never-ending desire for order. Jamie, true to his lived experience, kicked back in the only way that he knew how.

In revisiting the key features of inclusion, it is difficult to see how Jamie was present in his education. Yes, he attended, but he was not present in any meaningful sense. He did not come to the Halloween disco or take part in the sponsored run. He opted out wherever he could and, more often than not, the school supported his doing so.

On Friday last week, I was privileged to meet Fraser and Jack, pupils at Star primary school, which is just outside Markinch in my constituency. Star primary school is a beautiful Victorian building, but the boys showed me the leaking window ledges, which they asked me to raise directly with the cabinet secretary; I have now done so.

The boys proudly took me around their school. They showed me where the P1s were taught, and they explained to me their models of spaghetti stuck together with marshmallows, emulating the engineering of the new Queensferry crossing. They took me to the back field and explained all the different shrubs that they had planted. Jack and Fraser were totally engaged in their learning.

I ask members to contrast the experience of Jack and Fraser with that of Jamie. Jamie had lots of different needs. He needed additional support in class; he needed a safe environment to learn in; he needed to be nurtured in a way that secondary schools often do not do; and he needed his teachers to have ready access to his confidential information, allowing them to plan lessons and differentiate accordingly. Without that information, Jamie’s teachers could not meet his needs; without it, his teachers came face to face with an angry little boy and, sure enough, he was out the door of most classrooms before he had even sat down.

I hope that the Government’s consultation on the presumption of mainstreaming will look outside our educational bubble. We need to look at the health and social work sectors. They need to work smarter with their schools, particularly in the case of children who are at risk.

The Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004 placed a legal obligation on our education authorities to identify, provide and review the additional support needs of their pupils. There is a need for our local authorities, which deliver education, to revisit how they meet that requirement. Do they share the information with all staff? Is it available electronically, or do they print it out in a document that is available only to the head of department? Inclusion works only if every part of the system is prepared to talk to and trust the other parts.