Meeting of the Parliament 14 May 2025
I thank Miles Briggs for giving us the opportunity to debate this issue today. I should start by making absolutely clear the Scottish Green Party’s support for the principle of mainstreaming and that we reject any attempt to undo that. However, mainstreaming without adequate resourcing just sets up failure.
It sets up something worse than failure, actually. We have children in our schools who are being traumatised by being mainstreamed without adequate resources and support to meet their needs. One of the comments that we hear most often from parents and carers, teachers and support staff is that there needs to be a catastrophic failure for a child before the right support is put in place. Children need to be traumatised before the local authority allocates adequate resources to them.
I have sympathy for local authorities and I understand the resource pressures that they are under, but it cannot be right that the system relies on failure before action is taken to support a child whose needs are known and understood in advance.
I am glad that the motion calls for a review, but such a review cannot just repeat what we already know; it needs to build on the Morgan review, the co-ordinated support plan review, the Audit Scotland paper that Miles Briggs mentioned and multiple committee inquiries. It must focus on the actions and solutions that are required to address the implementation gap in the presumption of mainstreaming. There is no need for it to repeat the issues that we are already aware of.
I accept that there are financial and resource challenges, which are the greatest barrier to success in supporting children with additional needs. However, that is not an insurmountable barrier. I gently encourage colleagues to speak to their party colleagues on the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, which is about to consider my amendments to address some of the issues around local government financing that are relevant to the Housing (Scotland) Bill.
Alongside resourcing, we need to look at policy and legislative solutions. That is why the Green amendment, which was not selected today, pointed to the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004. That is a clear example of an area in which legislation needs to change. The world has moved on since 2004, as has our understanding of additional support needs.
As it stands, co-ordinated support plans are the only statutory plan available for a child with additional needs, whereby if there is a failure to support the child, they and the adults in their life have the opportunity of going to a tribunal to seek redress. However, to receive a co-ordinated support plan, a child must receive support from at least two different sources. The Parliament has already taken evidence on the challenges with that. One area in which we have made progress recently is to get educational psychologists and counsellors back into our schools. However, because they are now based in the school, that no longer counts as a separate stream of support for the child. Children who would previously have qualified for a co-ordinated support plan no longer do so, because of an improvement that we made in another area of support. That cannot be right.
I do not think that the solution is to update the primary legislation; the solution is to take the criteria for co-ordinated support plans out of primary legislation and put them into regulations, which the Government and Parliament would be able to update with far greater ease than has been possible for the relevant legislation over the past two decades.
I say to the Government, which I am sure will mention in closing the “Additional Support for Learning: Action Plan”, that it should ask itself whether, if every action in that plan is implemented and implemented well, it will shift the dial. None of us believes that it will. Every action in that plan is laudable and would be useful, but none of it will transform what is a catastrophic situation for many of the most vulnerable children in our schools—children whose needs are not being met—and for the wider school community, especially their parents and carers.
The debate is an opportunity for us to talk again about the required solutions to this problem. We have spent at least the past decade going over the same ground about what the problems are. I would really like to hear from the Government in particular this afternoon about the new actions that it will take to tackle the crisis in our schools.
15:48