Meeting of the Parliament 25 February 2020 [Draft]
I, too, thank Beth Morrison for her contribution and for the fact that we are debating the issue this evening. I also thank Jackie Baillie for bringing the debate to the chamber. I must say that I need to leave immediately after I make my speech because I have another commitment.
I think that we would all agree that our schools are places where all our children and young people play, learn and grow. However, for those with a learning disability, who perhaps sometimes find it harder to communicate how they feel or what they are worried about, their school is not always a friendly and nurturing place. We hear that the behaviour of young people with a learning disability can sometimes be interpreted as being challenging. Physically restraining or secluding them, sometimes in locked rooms, is clearly too often seen as being the solution.
With there having been just under 2,700 recorded incidents of restraint and seclusion in 2017-18, we need urgently to examine whether there is clear enough guidance and regulation on the practices, and whether staff are being properly supported. Just as concerning is the fact that the 2,674 incidents that were identified by the Children and Young People’s Commissioner involved 386 children. Daniel Johnson made the point that that means that some children are being restrained or secluded seven times a year, and that, for some children, the number will be much higher than that. Something is going badly wrong if practices that are supposed to be the very last resort are being used on some children almost once a month in the school year.
This is fundamentally a children’s rights issue. In 2018, the Scottish Children and Young People’s Commissioner, who is the guardian of children’s rights here, became so worried about the impact of restraint and seclusion on children and their rights that he invoked his investigatory powers for the first time. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed concern about use in schools of restraint and seclusion on disabled children, including children with autism. It recommended that restraint be
“used against children exclusively to prevent harm to the child or others and only as a last resort.”
However, it is not clear in all those almost 2,700 instances that it really was the last resort and that no harm was involved. Indeed, the Challenging Behaviour Foundation and Positive and Active Behaviour Support Scotland found that 58 per cent of the families whom they surveyed said that restraint had, in fact, led to injury. In addition, 91 per cent of CBF survey respondents reported a negative emotional impact on their child.
Given the seriousness of using physical restraint against and secluding pupils, I find it absolutely astonishing that there is no proper system for recording it. The children’s commissioner’s “No Safe Place” report noted that, as well as some local authorities lacking guidance on the practices, not all instances are recorded and that local authorities record seclusion and restraint in inconsistent ways, with 10 local authorities failing to record all instances and four recording none at all. As such, it is almost certain that the 2,700 instances referred to in the motion is an underestimate. I welcome the Scottish Government’s intention to develop a standard reporting system to ensure consistent recording and monitoring of incidents, and I look forward to learning more about the timescale.
Part of the problem is lack of resourcing of our teaching and support staff. My colleague Ross Greer has drawn attention to the precipitous decline in the number of additional support needs staff over the past decade. Between 2010 and 2016, there was a 145 per cent increase in the number of pupils with additional support needs. At the same time, the number of ASN teachers and ASN support staff in our schools has decreased. The ratio of ASN pupils to ASN teachers has gone from 18 pupils to one teacher in 2010, to 58 pupils to one teacher in 2018.
Enable Scotland’s earlier “#IncludED in the Main!?” report revealed that fewer than 12 per cent of the education workforce felt satisfied that they could meet the educational and developmental needs of a child or young person who has a learning disability. A variety of established techniques support children who have additional support for learning needs to be included safely alongside their peers. Those are standard in health and social care settings; it is important that school staff also have access to training in those techniques. Greens welcome Enable Scotland’s call for positive support strategies to be rolled out to all schools, such that there are two trained staff on site all the time.
Last year, my colleague John Finnie was successful in providing children with equal protection from physical assault. It was a landmark step towards protecting the rights of Scottish children in law, but we cannot claim to be the safest place and the best place in the world for children to grow up when children—overwhelmingly, children with ASN—are subjected in school to practices that the UN and our children’s commissioner say contravene their rights.
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