Pupils with additional support needs are being failed

Earlier this week, a new report declared that the majority of pupils with additional support needs are being failed… and nobody was surprised.

So, in today’s newsletter, I’m going to try to explain what has gone so very, very wrong with inclusion in Scottish education.

First, an important starting point: the idea (and ideal) of presumed inclusion is absolutely correct, because we absolutely should strive to ensure that what we regard as ‘mainstream’ spaces become ever more accommodating to the full spectrum of needs and experiences in our society.

It is surely self-evident that, so far as possible, young people with additional support needs deserve to receive a full and enriching educational experience alongside their peers – after all, why would they have any less of a right to that than everyone else?

It’s also better for our society as a whole to normalise the existence of the huge range of different needs that people have, and to expand our experiences of the generally small but often transformative adaptations that make inclusion possible. That’s as true of the adult world as it is of schools, by the way.

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Ultimately, adopting inclusion as the starting point of your decision making is the only logical and ethical choice. The alternative is a presumption that some people – in this case, some children – deserve exclusion from society.

But while principles really do matter, the real-world practicalities are also rather important – and that is where the problems lie. This is not, after all, just a philosophical debate, and we’re not talking about theoretical beings inside some sort of educational thought-experiment: this is about the day-to-day experiences of hundreds of thousands of very real children.

Promises of inclusion aren’t worth anything if they’re broken, and let’s just be honest about this: in the real world, where real children of real parents go to real schools with real staff, those promises have been broken.

Yes, it is definitely the case that there are now more young people with additional support needs being educated in mainstream settings, but it’s not enough just to get people in the room – you also have to actually meet their needs.

And for far too many, we do not. When I shared our coverage of that damning report from the Education, Children and Young People Committee on Twitter, one user argued that we don’t have a presumption of inclusion in Scotland, we have a presumption of mainstreaming. That is absolutely spot on.

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It’s really easy to send more and more children into mainstream settings while claiming that you’re going to meet their needs, but actually including those children in mainstream education is another challenge entirely – and one that we have not met.

The government’s own materials outline four key features of inclusion, of which being ‘present’ is just one; the others are that children must be ‘participating’, ‘achieving’ and ‘supported’.

‘Participating’, we are told, “does not only refer to school work, homework and involvement in subjects” – it is about “full involvement in the life of the school”.

The focus on ‘achieving’ means that “all children and young people should receive the support that they need to reach their full potential”, but the massive attainment gaps between those who do and do not have additional support needs shows just how far away we are from this sort of reality.

Pupils being ‘supported’ is “primarily about how children and young people are enabled to achieve their full potential”. It means that “barriers to learning” must be addressed “for all children and young people”.

Can we be confident that children with additional support needs are present, participating, achieving and supported, and therefore included? No. Not at all.

You have to understand, at this juncture, that teachers have been saying all of this right from the very beginning. When I joined the profession in 2011, it was already clear that the resources were not available to fully support every pupil, and since then the challenge has grown year on year as more and more young people are registered with an additional need.

With the pandemic as the final catalyst, and the level of need now greater than ever, we have reached an inevitable crisis point. Teachers are being asked to do more and more with less and less, and things are so bad that everyone – even those who have spent years refusing to see what was right in front of them – can now see that the necessary resources for the job are not available.

But the truth is that those resources have never been available.

We have never had enough staff.

We have never had enough time.

We have never had enough funding.

Because ultimately, there has never been enough commitment.

At no point has a genuine presumption of inclusion existed in Scotland, just that aforementioned presumption of mainstreaming, and the consequences of the failure to translate the latter into the former have been enormous.

In some ways we are now facing the worst of all possible worlds, with insufficient specialist provision and insufficient resources for mainstream inclusion.

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And so, all across the country, there are teachers whose mental, physical and emotional health is being destroyed as they trying to do the impossible and support all of the pupils in their classes; there are parents who feel like they are being forced to watch their child struggle and suffer in a system that, despite all the proclamations, does not and will not meet their needs; and worst of all, there are children going through hell every day because we apparently don’t think that they deserve better.