Hansard

I apologise to you, Presiding Officer, and to members in the chamber, because I must leave early tonight to catch the evening plane home.

Tomorrow, one of the things that I will do is visit Sandwick junior high school, which is at the south end of Shetland, with the two members of the Scottish Youth Parliament for our islands. An issue on which we want to reflect is the one that Jenny Gilruth has just elegantly described. In addition to doing one of our normal—for want of a better word—surgeries with the senior pupils, I know that they want to talk to us about mainstreaming because of today’s debate.

Occasionally I wonder whether this place is relevant to what goes on in the wider world, but two things have happened this week that, in the context of this debate, have made me think that it absolutely is relevant. One was the school getting in touch to ask me to bone up on the issue, so that I know what I am talking about in the debate. The second was that a teacher—a very old friend, with whom I went to school—who has taught down here in the mainland of Scotland for years, phoned me up last night to say, “I think there’s a debate on mainstreaming in Parliament tomorrow”, and to give me a list of observations to make. I thought that I had better make them before the next class reunion.

I recognised a lot of my friend’s observations in Iain Gray’s remarks about the reality of teaching. I took on board a lot of what John Swinney said about the international context and the manner in which this Parliament addressed mainstreaming in those early years—Iain Gray and Liz Smith mentioned that, too—but as my very old friend said, “You’ve got to remember the reality of what happens in the classroom now.”

My friend talked about the difficulty of finding staff who are available, experienced and able to hit the ground running in tackling the challenges of mainstreaming. She talked about the difficulty of finding time to train staff adequately. A vast majority of support workers are attached to individuals; that has consequences for the possibilities of sharing support across classrooms, which in my friend’s school are very limited. I know that that is the reality in many schools, and it affects teachers and support for other pupils.

My friend observed that teachers and learning support workers in schools have never worked harder, but we have a reactive system, in which there is no effective management of ASN in the mainstream. She also said that accommodation has to be right; there needs to be enough space across the school estate or within classes for pupils to have the right access to nurturing and quiet time, should they require it, as many pupils do.

Those are the practical observations of a classroom teacher who has worked in education for a long, long time and who absolutely believes in the principles of mainstreaming and wants the system to work but thinks that more needs to be done. I think that her observations are quite telling.

I welcome the guidance, consultation and research that the cabinet secretary mentioned in his speech, but as part of the consultation, logic requires that the Government adopt the recommendation of the Education and Skills Committee in its report, “How is Additional Support for Learning working in practice?”, which was published in May. The committee said in paragraph 7:

“The Scottish Government must also assess the extent to which a lack of resources is impacting on mainstreaming in practice and more generally on the provision of additional support for learning in mainstream education.”

I will be grateful if the Government confirms that it will do that.

I am with Iain Gray. This is not a political point; it is better than that, because it is much wider. It is about the children and young people for whom we need to do so much more, as I think that everyone, from John Swinney onwards, recognises. That was the point of many of the Education and Skills Committee’s recommendations in May on the area. We said:

“Resource limitations that are impacting on these processes include: the number of trained ASN teachers and ASN assistants, the availability of specialists including mental health specialists and educational psychologists, the level of resources supporting the ASN Tribunal process and other appeal processes, and the availability of spaces in special schools.”

Liz Smith made the point about spaces in special schools.

Those factors are increasingly important in the context of class sizes across Scotland. The Government’s own statistics point out fairly that class sizes in primary schools are rising, that by 2015 only 12 per cent of schools had classes of 18 or fewer, that since 2010 there has been a 153 per cent increase in the number of students with additional support needs, and that some 1,800 fewer support staff work in our schools than did in 2010.

That context—class sizes, teacher workload, teacher shortages in some areas, and resources more generally—has to be part of the consultation that the Scottish Government announced today, so that an assessment can be made of what money could do to change a system that is not working as well as we all wish it to do. When the exercise concludes, there needs to be a recognition of the importance of not just the guidance that John Swinney talked about but the practicalities in the classroom that the guidance will support. I hope that John Swinney will undertake to include those matters in the exercise. The exercise is very welcome, but it must address the financial issues.

I have two final points. I think that the Enable report that was produced last month, which other members have highlighted, makes an important contribution to this area of policy, not least because Enable is Scotland’s largest charity for people with disabilities. Significant attention should be paid to the comments of its executive director in relation to what is happening on a practical level. In addition, the report says that 80 per cent of the education workforce say that we are not getting it right for every child. If nothing else, that is the clarion call that should be addressed by the work in this area.