Meeting of the Parliament 14 May 2025
I am afraid to say that the 9,000 people on waiting lists for support in Glasgow will be pretty vocal in explaining that the universal provision is not meeting their needs and that the services that the minister thinks are there to support young people are just not there and are not statutory—that is the issue.
Most worryingly, this is a crisis that is not counted or monitored; those young people are now invisible to the Government, because they have been moved from a system that was counted—albeit there were concerns about the way in which it was counted—into a system that is not. Those people have become invisible, and that is having a huge impact on our schools, including on our teachers. There are more than 292,000 children with additional support needs in Scotland—I think that that figure might be from 2002, so it is probably slightly higher now—but there are only around 1,400 ASN teachers, which is one ASN teacher for every 200 children, against the backdrop of a system that is not providing the support that they need outwith school. That is not inclusion; it is a damning indictment of a Government that has walked away from education for all.
What my colleagues on our benches and, I hope, across the chamber believe is that what we need now is action. That starts with a proper workforce plan. We need a detailed strategy that recruits and retains teachers and ASN specialists and pastoral care staff alongside urgent reform of support services, including triage and referral, so that nobody is turned away from CAMHS or speech therapy without a plan in place.