Meeting of the Parliament 11 December 2025
I absolutely agree. Some really good frameworks have been developed, especially for care-experienced young people in our colleges and universities. I do not see why the same principles of care and support provision cannot be extended—some colleges are doing that, and we need that approach to be rolled out. I hope that, in the next parliamentary session, the education committee will take into account the findings in the report.
We will also need to return to the recommendations on teacher-led learning of BSL. In my time as an MSP, I have made a number of visits to schools where children were learning BSL. That has often been because a teacher has had the ability to provide such a lesson, which the kids love, or because there was a deaf child in the classroom and they wanted the child to be included in all lessons. We sometimes overcomplicate frameworks—teachers might already be delivering, and we need to be mindful of that.
Martin Whitfield touched on momentum, and Carol Mochan mentioned the postcode lottery around implementation. It is important that we consider that.
We have limited time, so I want to touch on mental health, because that has been my greatest concern during the time that I have served as an MSP. As we have touched on, there are huge challenges with the delivery of BSL in our health service. We have to be honest about that. I have had many pieces of casework in which individuals trying to access general practitioner services have not been provided with a BSL interpreter.
The ability to deliver BSL interpretation does not seem to have improved in some health board areas. I know from the committee report that there was general consensus among witnesses that interpreter provision had improved for planned appointments in most health boards, but the situation remained unsatisfactory in most accident and emergency departments. We must do more, and we must consider how that can be delivered. We need to embrace technology more, which was touched on in the report, but health boards often do their own thing in that regard. The national approach to the delivery of some of these outcomes needs to be revisited.
The Scottish Conservatives welcome the progress that has been made in Scotland since the passing of the British Sign Language (Scotland) Act 2015, but we are concerned about the number of issues—especially in relation to education and health—that are making it difficult for deaf people to engage in and be active members of our society and to access services so that they can realise their potential.
I hope that the Scottish Government will take on board the committee’s recommendations. I also hope that all the Parliament’s committees will learn from the report. We are all members of different committees, and I hope that some of the learning from the inquiry will be applied in the work that the Parliament is doing now and will do in the future.
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