Meeting of the Parliament 14 May 2025
I start with a letter from a primary school teacher to the First Minister:
“When I started teaching, inclusion was becoming more and more the norm within schools. Now that there are very few specialist schools, teachers are feeling the effects of inclusion on a daily basis. This policy, whilst admirable in its intention, does not work as it is drastically underfunded. In my school, it is fairly common for teachers to be physically assaulted by children whose needs cannot be met due to the inadequate level of funding. It’s even more common for our teachers to be verbally abused.”
That letter is from 2018, and it was anonymous at the time, because the teacher felt that if she raised the issues, she would be criticised for being anti-mainstream and anti-inclusion. I think that we have moved on.
It is a good step that the Government is accepting the review of mainstreaming, but we should have recognised the issue years ago, as it was raised on a regular basis by teachers, who were feeling it even back then. That was before the pandemic—we cannot blame it on the pandemic. This issue has been brewing for a long time, and I am afraid that we have ignored teachers.
It was a taboo, but now it is open, and I think that we are willing to explore it. When the cabinet secretary concludes, I would like to hear from her when the review will start, when it will conclude, and whether it will contain what Ross Greer highlighted—namely, practical actions for delivery. We have had review after review after review, but we need to have actions that make a difference.
I will talk about one other issue before I move on to practical solutions. All of this—absence, ASN, behaviour and violence—is interconnected. It is no surprise that pupils will want to stay away from school if they are not getting the appropriate support, or if they are getting violently abused, or if there is bad behaviour against them, or if they are not able to get taught properly. It is no surprise, and all those things are feeding into one another.
We need a solution that works. Part of that is about resource in the classroom. A teacher of 30 pupils will, on average, have 12 pupils who have an identified special need. Sometimes the number is much higher than that, and there is not one single need, but a variety of needs, so teachers need to be skilled in a whole range of different areas. That is almost impossible for them to manage.
So, what steps do we need to take? The mainstreaming review needs to look at the fact that the presumption of mainstreaming is almost turning into a compulsion of mainstreaming. Some parents do not want that for their child and do not think that being in the class is suitable for their child.