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........

© Herald Scotland