Meeting of the Parliament 02 November 2017
I very much welcome the opportunity to debate this issue, and I warmly welcome the Scottish Government initiatives that have been announced this afternoon. We would all acknowledge that this is not an easy debate, but nonetheless the issue is of huge significance to families across Scotland, and not just those with vulnerable children.
As the cabinet secretary rightly pointed out, there is a historical context to this issue. Those of us of a certain age remember very well a time when many pupils with very special needs found it very difficult indeed to be seen as deserving of any special focus in their own school, their own local authority or any national Government policy. I am happy to say that we have come a long way since that time, and I take this opportunity to note that supportive inclusion was one of the key attributes of Scottish education flagged up in a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It is important that we remember that. I think that we can all agree that inclusion is important for exactly the reasons that the cabinet secretary set out, and we must do all that we can to ensure that inclusion continues to mean pupils having meaningful engagement and experiences in their schools and not just simply being on the roll in a mainstream school. That is a very important difference.
Although a lot of good progress has been made, complexity is increasing, and it is that complexity that is challenging us to revisit the policy. I would argue that the situation has been somewhat complicated by a number of issues. First—the cabinet secretary referred to this himself—especially over the past decade, there has been much better detection of pupils with specific problems and a huge increase in the number of pupils identified as having ASN, including those whose needs are very complex. When the current definition was first used, 98,500 pupils were identified with ASN, but in the past five years, that figure has risen 73 per cent to 170,300. The news about the level of detection is good, but clearly the situation puts additional pressure on our schools.
That said, there are also key issues to address with regard to how effectively accurate data is being collected and then used in the relevant manner. We are very conscious of the widespread variation in the count across different local authorities; for example, in North Lanarkshire, only 6 per cent of the mainstream school population was identified as having ASN while the figure for Aberdeenshire was 35 per cent. What that flags up to me is possible differences in approach, and we might have to look at the issue in much greater detail. After all, the data is obviously crucial to informing policy.