An official review of additional support needs (ASN) provision in Scottish schools has found that the government and councils have failed to ensure that all pupils receive the help they need.
The new analysis, carried out by the Scottish Government’s own Professional Adviser for Education, warns that, despite some progress in recent years, support is “not always available at the right time”.
The most recent statistics reveal that more than 40 percent of all pupils are now recorded as having some form of additional support need, and more than 90 percent of those young people spend all of their time in mainstream classes. The extra help they receive may reflect the impact of specific challenges such as dyslexia, neurodivergence, and mental health problems, but can also includes those dealing with issues such as bereavement or caring responsibilities.
A section of the report exploring the ‘Challenges across the system’ highlights significant pressures that mean the school and early years system is “now carrying a scale of need that exceeds what its current structures were designed to manage.”
This finding echoes that of Audit Scotland, whose own analysis revealed that the Scottish Government “has not planned effectively for the potential impact” of the country’s inclusive approach to ASN.
The report points to problems with ‘increasing demand and complexity’, the need for ‘adaptation within stretched systems’, the ‘timing and predictability of support’, the impact of ‘variations in local planning systems’, gaps in national and school-level data, and ‘variation in experience across Scotland’.