Meeting of the Parliament 14 May 2025
All young people, including those with additional support needs, deserve the opportunity to learn and thrive, and our teachers, support staff, parents and pupils must be thanked immensely for all that they do every day, despite the system working against them, to make that so. Therefore, we welcome today’s debate and will support the motion in Miles Briggs’s name.
We will also support the Government’s amendment, although I have to say that its focus on warm words and its brevity rather indicate that the Government had little to add by way of action in a space that is so desperate for that. For Scotland’s teachers, support staff, parents and pupils, that will be disappointing. That is why our amendment adds crucial actions that we believe are necessary to support young people to thrive, and to do that alongside their peers, to be included in their schools and to get the support that they need.
The current system is not delivering that. As the committee said, the situation is intolerable. The reality is that, on this Government’s watch, the experience of children and young people with additional support needs, their families and the staff who support them is one of exhaustion, exclusion and crisis.
The motion calls for a review of the implementation of mainstreaming and a new model of support, because action is needed. I also want to be clear that the failure is not around the presumption of mainstreaming, which allows children to learn together with their peers; the failure is on the part of this Government for not building an education system that empowers that.
The ability of a child to learn together with their peers matters, and I know that because I lived it. I went to a mainstream school and I did well, but that was not by accident. It took strong staff and strong teachers who had the time and capacity to support me to get the education that I did. That is what every family in Scotland deserves; they should not have to fight for their child’s education to get it. However, right now, that is what they must do.
Parents feel abandoned by statutory services such as CAMHS when they are told that there is a new diagnostic pathway but are left waiting while nothing appears. I heard what the minister said about CAMHS, and I know that that service is not what all young people need, but if not CAMHS, what? Without a destination, we do not have a pathway but a crisis that leaves parents in distress and children without the support that they need.