Pam Duncan-Glancy: Every teacher you talk to right now is just burst

You’ve spoken before about having a largely positive experience in school, but you would of course have faced extra challenges and barriers even in a supportive environment. Are there any particular aspects of that experience that stick with you?

Although my own experience was very, very good, my mum and dad had to have a lot of fights on my behalf. So they had a lot of arguments about whether I would go to mainstream or special school. I went to three different primary schools, because the family moved, and each time I went they had to put a ramp in because every single one of them was completely inaccessible until I went.

I never realised the arguments that went on, but my mum and dad were going through a lot of hoops just in order for me to get in there.

I had a person kind of assigned to me - support assistants, you would call them now - who would help me about in the school day, help me go to the toilet, help me do my physio, make sure that I was able to get in and out the taxi.

I got taxis to and from school as opposed to school bus because it wasn't accessible. Sometimes that was a bit isolating because it meant I arrived at school in a different way from everyone else. And I left school in a different way from everyone else.

I remember one particular day when a friend of mine after school came to meet me about 3.20pm, because I usually left school just a couple of minutes before everybody else. I didn't realise it at the time, but I know now, it's because the support assistant was only paid till 3.30pm. At the time, I was like: why am I losing 10 minutes of school, but I totally respect it now.

This friend met me at the end of the day and said he’d come with me so I could leave school with a pal for a change. The person that was working with me that day said: "Oh it's too slow a process as it is - you'll be hindrance." I remember challenging that and saying: "Just ignore it. You're welcome to come with me because, you know, I've got friends like everybody else."

I got an after-school detention for that.

I also had six months out of school in the second or third year when I had to go to hospital in London. I was educated in the hospital. My school sent work down to London. My education, you might assume at that point, going into third year, I might need to resit a year but I didn't - I was able to continue my education exactly the same as everyone else. When I came back to school I hadn't really lost much, which meant I was able to keep going. School in hospital is actually really important and making sure that you can get the same education while you're there really matters too.

Our new education writer James McEnaney in conversation with Pam Duncan-Glancy (Image: Newsquest)

Interestingly, my sister lost a bit of school at that time as well. She went to the same school as me and is just a year younger, so we spent a lot of time together at school as well. It was really hard for her because I wasn’t there anymore, and my mum and dad were up and down to London trying to spend a bit of time with me. That was quite disruptive.

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But again, in the round, I had a really, really good time. It was when I was leaving school that things got much more difficult – at the ‘transitions’ point. Which is why I’ve now got a bill looking at transitions, because I recognise that it was a problem then and it’s still a problem now.

You talk about the fights that took place on your behalf, which is something that a lot of people with family members needing extra support will be able to understand. Was there a particular point where you realised all those fights that must have been happening in the past that you maybe hadn’t been aware of?

It was when I was leaving school that I understood fully the fights that my mum and dad had to put up on my behalf. I went down to visit Stirling University in the summer before I was going into fifth year to find out what it'd be like. It'd been recommended as somewhere that would be quite accessible to me, and it was. So I've gone down to Stirling University, met the course head, and she told me I'd need to get some good grades, particularly in English. I wasn't very good at English.

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So I thought: "Well, I'm going work really, really hard. And I did, although then I failed my prelim - I got something like 20%. And I thought that was it, I wouldn't be able to get into university, but I worked my socks off and ended up with an A in Higher English. So I got three A's and a B in fifth year, which was enough to get into university.

I was ready to go and then I couldn't take my place because Stirling Council and Moray Council (where I lived) didn't coordinate properly.

I was going to be moving hundreds of miles away from my family - from my entire life. My mum, my dad, my sister, and in some cases my friends had basically been my carers. I'd never relied on any kind of formal care before. And it wasn't till I was going to uni that I realised I'd need to. This was probably the one fight that my mum and dad weren't able to do quickly. It all became quite ridiculous and really time-consuming. We became project managers in our lives.

I went back to school that year and actually loved it. I crashed Modern Studies, which I’d never done before, and that is maybe the first point at which I made the connection between the fight and politics. Obviously, I got a bit of a political education and it piqued my interest in what parties can do for people and how they can make a difference. And that’s when I realised the amount of work my mum and dad had really put in for me.

But we still hadn’t resolved the problems with the support package, so the university agreed to keep my place open for another year. I had to defer entry for two years just to get the right support in place.

Pam Duncan-Glancy at the Emirates in Glasgow when she was elected in 2021 (Image: Colin Mearns)

If things go Labour’s way, you could well be education secretary after the next Holyrood election. How do your experiences change or influence what your approach to that job might be?

Hugely. I got into politics, as many of my colleagues did, because of the passion for social justice, equality and human rights. And I really do fundamentally think that the purpose of government is absolutely to ensure that we have a society that functions and that social justice is at its heart. And I can't imagine doing any job in government that doesn't have that at its heart. I consider education, when it works well, and when all the support is in place to allow people to flourish, to be a great leveller. And it is that approach that I would bring as cabinet secretary for education – I want all children get support to learn, to be around their peers, to grow as people, to explore their own identity - to make a contribution, basically.

There's also a huge debate, obviously, everyone will be aware of it, about mainstream versus special education. I've always thought that separating people at school can be quite difficult, because then how do you expect somebody, for example, to get a job - if you've never seen a disabled person in your classroom, why would you expect them in the boardroom?

How does the individual reintegrate, but also how does society accept that disabled people should have jobs like they do, or do other things like they do? It really is important to me, but not just as an approach to addressing disabled people's education. Whether you're from a poorer background, or whatever your background is, education has the opportunity – when it's done appropriately when people are supported and allowed to support each other – to be that great leveller.

Do you think things are better now than they were when you were at school? For pupils with a whole range of additional needs, have things gotten better or are they worse?

I don’t think it’s gotten better. In a lot of ways I think it could be worse. I heard a figure the other day: in 2008 there were 85 pupils with additional support needs to each education psychologist in Scotland. In 2022, it was 600-odd. That sort of thing shows the pressure in the system. I don’t think if you ask anyone, if any institution is better now than it was 10 to 15 years ago, that they’re going to say yes. I look at the outcomes for disabled students, and the outcomes that they and their families have, and I really struggle to see that it has gotten better.

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The statistics show that if you get to college or university, if you end up in education, training, or employment - you're bucking the trend as a disabled person. And largely, you're bucking the trend of someone who maybe comes from a poor background. But that's because you've got a hell of a struggle to get there in the first place and that shouldn't be the case. It shouldn't be the case that you need to literally fight, tooth and nail, to be able to get an equal education. And I don't just mean about disabled people or kids with additional support needs, I mean people from poorer backgrounds as well.

We should fix that by design.

That’s about looking at policy and practice to make sure that education really is that leveller that it can be.

And actually, right now, we’ve got more than 30% of pupils in classrooms with additional needs. That also has a huge impact on teachers and the other adults in schools and what they’re going to be expected to do, and we’re failing them too, because we’re not giving them the support that they need to be able to teach the classrooms of today.

We have exclusion and inequality by default and that’s why we have to fix it by design. We have to do it.

We just need to look at the numbers: the amount spent per pupil is going down, the amount spent per pupil with additional support need is disproportionately going down. We've got teacher workload leaving the profession creaking at the seams - every single teacher you talk to right now is just burst.

I think we've got environments in classrooms that are like pressure cookers, which has been, of course, exacerbated by the fact that there's a cost of living crisis and outside the classroom, everybody's stressing out about putting food on the table - including teachers! And then that transfers into the classroom.

But actually this has been going on for a long time and, low and behold, when you cut the number of support staff in schools, when you load teacher workload on top of teacher workload on top of more workload on top of more workload, you end up in an environment that really is untenable.