This article appears as part of the Lessons to Learn newsletter.

If you are in any way interested in, connected to, or affected by the various issues impacting upon Scottish education, you’ll be more than aware of the ongoing and increasingly severe crisis in provision for those with additional support needs (ASN), who now represent more than 40% of the total pupil population.

What you might not have known is that the Scottish Government asked one of its own advisers to carry out a “rapid review” of the current ASN landscape. That work is now complete, and the findings are absolutely damning. 

To put it simply, the report found that ASN provision in Scotland has been inadequate, and that major changes are required. Too many young people aren’t getting the support they need when they need it; too many families are having to fight their way through an opaque and overly-complicated system; too many teachers are struggling to support a widening range of needs without the time, resources or training to do that job effectively.

The support available is not always consistent within individual councils, never mind across them, and the different agencies that might be involved in securing and delivering that support aren’t particularly good at talking to each other.

The result is “a gap between Scotland’s ambition for inclusion and how additional support is experienced.” To put that another way: while the people in charge talk a good game about additional support for learning, the reality for families, teachers, and pupils looks very different.

And nothing about those conclusions is in any way unexpected. Indeed, these are exactly the sorts of concerns that were raised during The Herald’s special series on ASN in Scotland’s Schools, which ran in December 2024 special, and at various points both before and after that point.

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And it’s not just us: every major print and broadcast news outlet in this country has run stories, investigations, and special reports on ASN provision in schools. Last year, when I spoke about it on the BBC, the clip became (and I believe remains) one of their most-shared on social media.

So the truth is that this report should never have been needed, because anyone who was willing to actually listen to parents, teachers, and young people over the past few years would have already known about all of these problems. There is not one single sentence that should have been a surprise.

Instead of commissioning reports to state the obvious, a genuinely competent government would have been well down the road of delivering solutions by now; instead, ours needed to have one of its own advisers write a 24-page document that, by the author’s own admission, did not involve any new data collection of large-scale consultation.

Perhaps we should just be grateful that the powers that be are finally going to acknowledge the problems that so many have been shouting about for so long, but we’re still a very, very, very long way from actual solutions.

It’s worth remembering at this juncture that the SNP has a depressingly solid track record for making big educational promises – especially in the run up to elections – and then comprehensively failing to deliver.

This is the party that was going to slash primary school class sizes, eliminate the attainment gap, cut teachers’ class contact time, give every pupil a free laptop with free internet… as I’ve only got a 1000 word limit for this column I’ll have to stop there, but you get the point.

What’s more, this government has shown that it is not above using pupils with additional support needs for political purposes. Back in December 2024, Finance Secretary Shona Robison announced her intention to “fund a £29m ASN plan”. Within a few hours it had become clear that no such plan existed, and that the money was instead simply being offered to councils.

"While the people in charge talk a good game about additional support for learning, the reality for families, teachers, and pupils looks very different." (Image: PA)

Even the handling of this latest review has been cynical. If you’ve got the time, go and read the full report, and then read the government’s press release, and tell me if you think the latter is a fair, accurate, and honest reflection of the former.

Making headline-grabbing promises in the weeks before an election is easy, but as we have all seen, actually delivering on those promises tends to prove to be a problem for the SNP, especially when they involve schools.

There’s something else we should remember, and it’s a big one: the problems that have been highlighted in the new ASN review have been growing, and compounding for years, and the consequences for young people and their families have been incredibly serious. In some cases, they have been life-changing and completely devastating.

We should be absolutely clear that thousands of young people have been failed, and that for many those failures will negatively affect them for the rest of their lives. In the most extreme cases, they may have ruined lives.

So now, in 2026, after years and years of well-documented problems, and with an election just around the corner, the SNP tell us that this time they really are going to transform Scottish education and ensure that we really are ‘Getting it right for every child.’

Maybe this time it will be true.

© Herald Scotland