Welcome to the ninth meeting of the Education, Children and Young People Committee in 2024. The first item on our agenda this morning is the additional support for learning inquiry. This is our fourth formal session on this topic, which we will now be considering, where we consider how the Education and Additional Support for Learning Scotland Act 2004 has been implemented and how it is working in practice some 20 years on. Today we will hear from two panels of witnesses and we will be focusing on three themes throughout the inquiry, the implementation of the presumption of mainstreaming, the impact of Covid-19 on additional support for learning and the use of remedies as set out in the act. Today we are going to focus mainly on the first and third themes, but I am sure that we will likely touch on the second theme as well. Can I welcome our first panel? We have Megan Farr, the policy officer from Children and Young People's Commissioner in Scotland, David Mackay, head of policy projects and participation children in Scotland, and Marie Harrison, senior policy officer from My Rights My Say, Children in Scotland and, lastly, but not least, Chloe Minto, senior solicitor from the Govan Law Centre. Welcome and thank you for your written submissions that you have provided ahead of the meeting today. We are going to move straight to questions from members. Can I first bring in Pam Duncan-Glancy, please? Thank you, convener. Good morning, and thank you very much for joining us and for sending the information that you already have in advance. It has been hugely helpful. I just have one very broad opening question, which is this. Why do you think that parents have to fight all the time? What is the root cause of the difficulties that they and their children and young people face when accessing education? I would like to go first. Thank you, Megan. I think that there are two things. I think that the first is around something that comes up absolutely consistently every time there is a review on them. There has been a really large number of reviews in this area in the last 10 years. Angela Morgan is probably being the most comprehensive, and that is around resourcing. That is resourcing in terms of people a lot of the time, so it is particularly enough support day-to-day in the classroom. It is not something—I am sorry, I am not to jump on to mainstreaming here—it is difficult not to—I think that what we are seeing now is the result of 15 years of austerity, possibly longer of reducing budgets. Decisions have been made within that area of having austerity about what resources are put towards ASN and how those resources are deployed. I think that it is really concerning that there is sometimes not being prioritised or there has been prioritisation, which does not—is it aimed at meeting the rights of all children? In human rights terms, there is a duty on the state, and that means the Scottish Government, that means local authorities, that means other organisations, health boards particularly around our health professionals. It also means the UK Government to ensure that resources are used to the maximum extent possible to realise children's rights. I think that what we are seeing across the UK, our colleagues and the other commissioners officers have made similar comments about resourcing in ASN as one area where there has not been the prioritisation, and what we are seeing now is the outcome of that. I think that the other reason that parents have to fight is that actually there is a massive gap in terms of right to remedy with additional support needs. We have a really good mechanism and Mae gave evidence here last week and was really clear about how her tribunal works, but it is only available to a very small number of people because it is only available to those who either qualify for a CSP, whether or not they get one, or whether there is a disability discrimination case. I was really concerned looking at the SPSO response and this is not a criticism of them because I think that they are right that they would not expect to get complaints on ASL, but actually if they are not going to the tribunal and they are not going to the SPSO, and that is what SPSO has said in their evidence, where are complaints going? I think that is where the parents having to fight has come from is that there is actually no effective way of challenging decisions around children's additional support needs. Mary Harrison? I think that the whole field of additional support needs as well is very wide and I think that there might be a tendency for everybody from policy level and all the way down to school level to think about children with additional support needs as a minority or as a very small group of children and young people and as such. We try to do inclusion as if we are talking to a very small cohort of children, but we are not. We are talking about 37 per cent, I think, was the last number of 241,000 plus children with additional support needs in education. So I think that to answer your question, there are so many children and young people and I think that in order for inclusion and for education to be meaningful to all of these children and young people, we need to acknowledge that this is a very wide field and we are not talking about a small number of children. We are talking about more than a third of the children and young people in Scottish schools, so I think that we need to consider some kind of a cultural shift where instead of thinking about those children and those children, we need to think about all our children. I think that in particular around awareness of the duties that education authorities have and training of local authorities to ensure that all of their staff understand what the rights of children with additional support needs are is very important. We at the Government Law Centre are able to provide free training to local authorities. Unfortunately, that is not something that is picked up on. We are very pleased to be providing training to MSP caseworkers next week and we hope that that will be a very positive shift in ensuring that duties are understood. However, we remain concerned that we consistently have to reiterate what the duties are on an education authority to the authority. A lot of those cases do not even end up at tribunal because sometimes it is as clear as they simply do not know and once they have that information, you see adjustments being put into place. I think that we see it particularly around disability discrimination claims and once they see the things that they should be doing, we tend to see them happening. That is a big one for us. I think that it is interesting that the language used, which certainly came across in the Morgan review, is the idea of parents fighting for their children's rights. We are not currently getting it right and the issue is that children and young people are not experiencing their rights under UNCRC, especially article 12, article 28, article 29. I think that Megan has touched on resources and the amount of funding and staff time and training there is therefore for staff, which I think is a key issue. It also links into communication with parents and carers and the impact of tight resources limiting teacher or support workers' time to have for communication, for planning and really working together effectively because then it leads to that kind of culture where it feels like a fight rather than actually working together. That is something that we hear quite a lot through the enquire helpline. A large proportion of our calls are actually focused on communication between parents and carers and in many cases we find that there is a relationship breakdown when actually it is just poor communication rather than in many cases the school is doing their best to put in supports in place, supporting children and young people effectively. That communication, clarity about what is happening within the school environment is not clear between old partners, the young person, the parents and carers and the school working together. That is a key challenge that we need to overcome. I will resist the temptation to talk about CSPs and resources because I know that other colleagues are going to talk about that. Why do you think that communication is breaking down and what do we need to change to make sure that everybody knows who should be communicating what at the right point to whom? I think that school staff are really stretched out with what they have to deliver. We have seen the lack of time for peer learning discussion, discussion with colleagues and then making that time to reach out to families. That is a time intensive but important part of the process. When education professionals feel that they are pulled in lots of different directions, we have heard from some of the previous evidence given to the committee that there is this focus on making sure that the child in front of them is getting the right support in school and that they are prioritising that direct work with the child or young person. It is important that that bigger picture, there is enough time for staff to be able to take that step back, think about how frequently they are communicating with home, with parents and carers and the bigger picture, that kind of network. I do not know if you have some more to say. I was just going to add, and I am sure that this will come up again later, but training is still lacking when it comes to meaningful ways of engaging and supporting children and young people. It is something that, within the MyRights MySays service, we work very hard at. We know that if you want to build positive relationships with families and with parents, you need to start by building a positive relationship with the child. In order to build a positive relationship with a child that has additional support needs, you need to invest a lot of time and you need to have a level of expertise around how to communicate in positive ways. It can come down to things like language. We hear children as well who are saying that they are being called aggressive, for example. If you call a child aggressive, that is going to be really hurtful and that is going to make that child take a stance against whoever said that. I think that there is still language being used that is detrimental to children's desire to have positive relationships with school staff. We have recently spoken to a young person who said that I have just checked out. There is a lack of trust for some children and young people because they feel that they are the ones being blamed for the issues that they are experiencing in school. It is almost like the onus is on the child to change to fit into the school box rather than the school box being willing to change around the child. It is about this culture shift, trying to focus on the culture, trying to focus on the structures and why they are not working for the child, rather than looking at the child and the family as the ones that need to change. A child with additional support needs cannot change their make-up. They are who they are and they have value, they have rights and they can contribute in so many ways. In order for them to do that, we need to be willing to not just ask them questions but to actually listen to what they are telling us. If they have touched on the resources that are stretched, it can be very hard to invest that time and energy in the children and young people that they deserve. If it fails there, then it is not going to work for the parents either. You have this very cataclysmic relationship on your hands where parents lose trust as well. I think that is what happens a lot. I think that our local authorities and schools want to do the best that they can for children and young people. I do not think that there is anyone out there who wants children to fail or to not be happy or to not attain or achieve and feel happy in school. I think that the landscape is such that there is a lot of mistrust on all sides. I think that local authorities are trying to spread themselves very thinly and parents want more than the local authorities are willing to give or able to give. You end up with this very hostile working environment where everybody feels unhappy, teachers feel de-skilled and children feel that they cannot trust anyone. I am very aware of you encroaching into other areas of questioning again. That is okay. Chloe, you want to respond to that? Thank you, Marie. I mainly covered the points that I wanted to make about ensuring that the child is at the heart of things. In terms of communication breakdown, what we tend to see and I know that Ms Dunsmeyer commented on it in her evidence session is masking. We see that in almost every single tribunal case that we are taking forward. We are having questions about why the child is so different at home than in school. Why are they stimming at home and why are they not in school? What is the root cause of that? There are not enough questions being asked about that by the education system and that leaves parents feeling very failed. As opposed to that, that adds into that fight that we see. They feel that there is a blame apportioned on to them. That is something to do with them. They are only seeing it in the home space. I think that masking is a central part and that education authorities need to take more responsibility in terms of that. We should not be settling for a child behaving entirely differently or presenting entirely differently at home than at school. Thank you. Megan, have you got something briefly to add to this? Very briefly. I hope that I can get an opportunity to come back to comment about the conversations that will be extensive throughout the day. Some of the threads will be picked up later on. In terms of communication, I think that there is something about language and about how we talk about children with additional support needs, particularly ones who are distressed. That has come through in some of the narrative about behaviour in the last year or so. If you look at the exclusion statistics, they are disproportionately children with additional support needs. I think that that narrative has probably not been helpful in terms of relationships between schools. It probably also reflects the way that some parents are hearing about their children or are hearing their children described. You will find the cause of the conversation that develops. You will get the chance to make all of the points that you are desperately trying to do at the moment. I bring in Michelle Thomson. Good morning, everybody. We have already started to touch on this area. I am interested in how the concept of a rights-based approach can facilitate decisions on how money is spent to support all pupils. I think that we have had some very good submissions about a rights-based approach. I will probably come to you first, Megan, but I am interested in how where a balance needs to be struck, how money, the filthy looker, can start to make decision-making. Perhaps we can start with you, Megan. Inevitable, it was going to come to me first. I think that just to go back to the point that I made earlier about what those duties in the UNCRC mean. Although the incorporation act has become an act this year, the UK Government, the UK Parliament made a commitment to those obligations in the UNCRC when they ratified it in 1991. These are really longstanding commitments around realising children's rights and using resources to the maximum extent possible in the world's sixth-largest economy. That is the context for it. It then comes down to how individual decisions are made. Those individual decisions are made at all levels of government, UK Government, Scottish Government, here in Parliament, and in councils across Scotland. We know that all of them are making tough decisions and have been doing so for probably two decades, certainly for 15-plus years. In order to take a rights-based approach to budgeting, there has been a lot of work done in the last few years, and quite a lot of it by SHRC, our colleagues literally upstairs for us, have done a lot of work around human rights-based budgeting more broadly. There has also been work done by our office and by others around children's rights and budgeting. The Scottish Government has the Children's Rights and Wellbeing Impact Assessment CREA, which can be used as part of budget setting. It is difficult to see how it is used—it is difficult to see whether it is used consistently. We see some extremely good CREAs coming from Government, parts of Government, and not always the ones you would expect. We then see some which lack detail, which appear to have been done, or it is very clear that they have been done after decisions have been made. That is not how they should work. We quite often see consultations from the Scottish Government that say, have you got any information for your CREA? We should be getting a draft CREA with a consultation. It sometimes feels like they are asking respondees to do the CREA for them, and that is not how it should be. In terms of local government, I did a bit of a dip into local government budget setting a couple of years ago now as part of this work, and again it was really inconsistent. I think the other thing that I was concerned about was how much information elected members get, sometimes in the budget packs that councils gave their councillors. There was simply a yes or no that an EQIA had been done. CREAs were much less visible. The mechanisms are there, and it is about impact assessing, and it is about doing that with a mind always to what are the obligations. Particularly with incorporation coming into force in July, these will be legal obligations. There will be legal obligations to deliver an education for children that meets not only article 28, which is the right to an education, but also article 29, which talks about development of a child's personality, talents, mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential. I think that we are not doing that for far too many children at the moment. I sense that everybody else in the panel wants to—excuse me, I have a bit of a chesty cough today, so you will have to put up with that, but I would like to bring everyone else in the panel. I think that you have given us a very good articulation of what, but I am also interested in how the flow of money affects the rights-based approach. Correct me if I am straying here, but one of the really important things to consider when you want to deliver a rights-based approach, not just to funding but to life in general, is the how. At the moment we are in a situation where we have a lot of remedies for 12 to 15-year-olds under the ASL Act in July, we are going to get the full set of delivery on the UNCRC Incorporation Act, and I personally am not convinced that I fully understand how the two are going to be compatible. At the moment delivering on the my rights, my say service, we are able to support a cohort of children to exercise their rights, so very much we are funded by Scottish Government to ensure that 12 to 15-year-olds can exercise the rights that they have been given under the ASL Act. That is 13 rights. The CRC is 54 rights condensed into 42 potentially that would directly impact children and young people. I think that it is really important that we do not just implement policy or legislation, there has to be some kind of mechanism to support this in real life, not just for children but for their families and for the professionals who are going to be dealing with these issues as well. I am not sure what that is going to look like if it is going to be a similar structure to my rights, my say. I can just conclude that through the work we do, the ASL Act, we can respond to those children, but again, 241,000 children with additional support needs, my rights, my say has supported around 1,000 over the six years that we have been active. It is not to say that all 241,000 would have needed our support. A lot of children with additional support needs to cope very well within their education settings, but I do think that we are scratching the surface still. We have to sort of acknowledge that in a few months' time more rights are coming and there has to be some kind of allocation of funds to ensure that those rights are not just pretty on paper and not just sort of a flagship that we can pull out to say we have done this, we suffer from implementation fatigue sometimes and we need to get over that. We need to really make sure that that is achievable and accessible for children and young people and families and professionals alike. I do not know if Chloe and Davies want to come in with this concept of complexity over the existing rights plus, as you point out, new ones coming in. I do not know if you want to add anything. Chloe? Yes. I think I would echo that it is extremely important that we look at how this is going to be put into place. Again, some of our figures highlight that we are only scratching the surface. Our Government funding is expansive. We are the Government service that allows any parent or young person that has a right of reference to take their case forward to the tribunal. We have heard the number of how many children with additional support needs there are and we have only had around 624 files in the past five and a half years. That is not for the lack of us trying, and particularly when we looked after children. We have only had eight files in the past two years for looked after children. That is an extreme concern to us and that is a group where we are seeing rights not being realised. I celebrate what is about to happen and I am very hopeful that we will see some very fruitful progress in the space for children. However, I do have some concerns and reservations about how children are going to access those rights. I have another point to make about the presumption of mainstream and a best interest test, but I think I will leave that for just now. I imagine we will circle back. We will get a row if we stray off topics. I can see that I was keen to come in on some points. In terms of children in Scotland, I worked alongside Carney, Gean and Catanac a couple of years ago to do some work around child rights-based approaches to budgeting, which I will be happy to share with the committee. There are lots of other resources that the UN has produced around taking a child rights approach. The important thing is to consider that participation and transparency and accountability as part of that process. When I am talking about participation, we are talking about individual decision-making. Decisions at an individual level, but also those mechanisms to influence wider policy and broader policy. It is not just necessarily about their own lives, it is about how education is delivered. Those meaningful and broad participation of children and young people is not just a really narrow, targeted group of young people. There are much wider opportunities for that engagement. I keep catching your eye, Megan. I do not know if you have a final point on this without straying into other topics. I was going to come in on participation. I am glad that David said most of it already, but there has been a recent and concerning instance of that. That is around behaviour in schools where there has been very little engagement with children and young people. There has been a lot of effort put into engagement with various groups of adults around it. We cannot make decisions. It applies to budgeting, but it applies to all other areas of policy-making as well. It is not right-spaced if it is not involving the children. As David said, it is a broad range of children. It cannot be tokenistic. There are groups of children who do fantastic jobs, including ambassadors. You will hear about them, I am sure, but it needs to grow broader than that. It needs to be children who are being affected by policies that are being consulted with. That is another gap in terms of Creol. We see it a lot. We have spoken a little bit about the presumption of mainstreaming, but I am trying to figure out what role the specialist school settings have in our system when it comes to that presumption of mainstreaming. We heard from Matthew Cavanaugh from the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association that they have a real opportunity to meet the needs of individual pupils whom they know better. I was wondering what you thought the role of those specialist settings might be in the presumption of mainstreaming. What are the criteria for when that specialist setting is appropriate and is understood and consistently applied? That would be helpful. Do you want to come in first, Maria? I am happy to. Primarily the specialist schools, we see absolutely wonderful practice in mainstream schools as well. We see a lot of commitment, but one of the things that could maybe be utilised more is some kind of learning exchange and is trying to support mainstream schools to learn from specialist settings what it is they are doing, what it is that works really well for them and how we can take some of that good learning and try to transfer it into mainstream settings as far as that is possible, to some kind of continued professional learning, try to see if there is scope to deliver on that. We are still seeing that mainstream schools do not have the facilities that specialist provisions have. They are different settings. They are in some ways trying to deliver on an inclusion agenda that the schools physical make-up are not built for, whereas specialist schools are specifically built with children with additional support needs in mind. I do not think that that will breach everything, but I think that trying to do some kind of collaboration and create opportunities there would be really important. Before I bring other members in, unashamedly, I will have a little, you know, Corry High School, Corry Community High School has Woodlands specialist school next to it, and it was my old head teacher at Melvin that had the inspiration to put them so close together, so there is that sharing. I was wondering if, perhaps, if you are aware of any other, as we are hearing evidence from the rest of the panel, if you have other opportunities like that and maybe comment on how that might work for parents, pupils and staff, because it does have that collaboration. We will bring in Megan and then we will come to David and Chloe. Thanks, convener. I'm going to turn the question on head a little bit, because the UN Committee on the Rights of People with Disabilities, a definition of a disability, which the Committee on the Rights of the Child has adopted as it is, also applies to the UNCRC, so it will effectively become part of Scots law to either whatever it is, talks about a long-term physical, mental, intellectually or sensory impairment, which I'll emphasise this, but an interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others. In terms of talking about mainstreaming, what that means is that, actually, if talk about additional support needs, there's a large, I think a large proportion of that 37% of children with additional support needs who maybe don't need to have additional support needs, but because the barriers that they are experiencing in the school are needing additional support, so there is something about that. Is that an example to help us understand? Yes, so particularly secondary schools and particularly the newer-build secondary schools are often very large open spaces, they're very noisy, they're very bright when there's lots of children moving around, they're very crowded and particularly children with anautistic spectrum disorder can find that extremely overwhelming and sometimes the adaptation need is very small, it's taking them out of their busier bits of the rooms, but we're still deciding schools like that. There's a number of primary schools that were built around four-class clusters and a block with no walls, those ones are also really difficult environments, so in terms of that, in terms of another example, if schools aren't physically adapted for disabled children, then they need additional support to get around the school because the school doesn't have level access, so there's a couple of examples around that. And I know we've got some questions around buildings later on, I'm strained into other areas. But buildings is an effector, but school cultures is an effector as well, and sometimes just fairly minor changes, and you go into schools, we visit schools fairly regularly, you go into ones that you can see children who are autistic children absolutely joining in with the rest of the class and not experiencing those barriers because the school meets their needs sort of automatically because of the way the schools run. You go into others where you can see them just not coping with aspects of the school day, so flipping mainstream a little bit on the head and that I think we've got an issue where mainstreaming is not meeting the needs of a big chunk of children that it should. But in terms of special schools, there's definitely still a role for specialist provision. Your example of Woodlands is a really good one because it doesn't need to be a separate school, it could be a unit, it could be enhanced provision, it could be a model where a child spends part of their time in mainstream classes, part of their time in specialist provision. So the other issue around specialist schools is that we do have some really highly specialist schools in Scotland which meet, are attended by some of the children with the most complex disabilities and particularly the Doran review, the grant aided special schools. Those schools have been sort of in limbo with their funding for a good dozen years or so now. They do an amazing job, that's a group of children who are never going to be in mainstream. Mainstream is never going to be able to meet their needs, they've got very complex medical conditions often as well as disabilities. There is some work being done to share some of that expert knowledge that comes from those schools with mainstream, but that's a growing number of children, it's a growing number of children for a good news story. Children are surviving medical conditions like that now into adulthood and that's an area where there will always be a place for specialist schools. I'm trying to drill down around that. If there is specific criteria, and I know that it sounds a bit brutal when we're talking about our young people to talk about things in that way, but what the criteria for when a specialist setting is appropriate and what's bad, so can I bring Chloe in on that first please? Yes, so we deal with the policing request refusal so that would be where a parent has applied for their child to attend a specialist provision, rather than being a positive criteria. It's essentially the local authority can select from 12 grounds of refusal to say why the special provision would not be appropriate. That can be things like capacity, it may be that the school is not suited to the ability and aptitude of the child and all of these are on top of the presumption of mainstream being one of the reasons that they can be refused. One thing that I would say is that when the local authority issue those letters there's not a lot of information there, so if we're relying on a ground of refusal such as the special school is not suited to the child due to the ability and aptitude of the other children in the school, what would be really helpful at that stage would be for more of an understanding as to why parents are not wanting to push their children into a provision that's not right for them, but we need that transparent conversation and dialogue to ensure that we get the child in the right space. Often we have difficulties in trying to get parents through the door of the special school to see it and to see what their child would be experiencing, so that is essentially the way that it works. Sometimes local authorities will set their own criteria and say that the school is for complex needs children, they may use the term or they may say that this is a school for children with intellectual disabilities. That is simply just the local authority criteria and when we're at the tribunal what we would be arguing is whether the ability and aptitude of the children match the child that we're looking at rather than any external criteria that the local authority has tried to apportion to a school. What's important is the pupil profile that we see in front of us and I do think that there's a place for special provisions. The language I do find jarring that we still use the phrase special school, that is the phrase that is in our legislation and the only reason that that's why I'm using that language today, but that language is jarring for parents as well and that's something that I do think we need to think about in terms of as we continue to understand our use of language and how that impacts our children and young people. We see many success stories from children who have been through the tribunal, who have experienced exclusion through our inclusion of trying to keep them in a mainstream school and they have not been attending school, we then see them thriving, performing in school concerts and we do, we build up a report with our clients where they feedback because they've been through such a traumatic time with their child. We take a lot of pleasure in hearing those success stories and it's not a tragedy when a child has to be placed in a special provision, it's a tragedy when we're not meeting their needs and trying to fit them to a mould. Integration is not enough, simply saying that a child is in a mainstream and they are physically within the building is not enough and our children all have the right to achieve their own potential and I think special schools are extremely key in unlocking that. Thank you Chloe, I suppose your comment about each local authority having its own criteria does mean that it's probably not consistently applied. David, can I bring yourself in? Yeah, thank you, I completely agree with a lot of the points that the panel have made especially around language and just making sure that we're doing the best for individual learners. There's often a very binary discussion around mainstream and specialist schools and we know that there's lots of different approaches to how mainstream settings operate and many have ASL hubs and this can be very effective for children and young people so I think that broader thinking and drilling down into how they operate is important. I think there are not always consistent approaches with how different ASL hubs operate and we've heard that from my rights, my say service and that can lead to quite a bit of confusion I think with parents and carers so they're not always sure of the provision that is available within mainstream settings and that can lead to an idea that the support isn't available there within mainstream schools and that certain needs can only be met within specialist settings so and we know that that's not the case and that's not what's reflected in law so do you think there needs again that kind of communication issue and the information flow with parents and carers is really important?  I can't, I mean just echoing what David is saying we do see that confusion from parents we quite often hear that parents have made a placing request for example for a mainstream school that has an ASL hub attached to it because they then feel that that will give their child the chance to sort of do the mainstream but get support from the ASL provision but that's not how it works you know a placing request would have to be for that ASL provision often so it's just to say that that's a confusion we see on top of that you have learning hubs that are not necessarily ASL provisions and parents sometimes think they can make a placing request for these but they're sort of readily available for all children so there's a lot of inconsistency and a lot of confusion it sounds like. Yes I have one point just to pick up in terms of that the way the legislation operates at the moment it doesn't allow for a parent to apply essentially for a split placement so if you'd be looking for your child in a mainstream school for half of the time and a special school for another half of the time the legislation doesn't allow the parent to do that and have the remedy of the tribunal placing request process you can try and get that through a coordinated support plan and I think that will probably feed into a conversation later about why coordinated support plans are very important because they unlock certain remedies that may not be available elsewhere. Helpful, thank you. Ben Macpherson, can we come to yourself now please, thanks. Thank you, convener. On language, Spartans Community Foundation and my constituency call their provision the alternative school which I think is good. Two brief questions on advocacy. First of all do you have any comment on how the pandemic has affected demand for advocacy and support for families? It would be interesting to hear how that has potentially affected the demand. Secondly, I'm curious about the consistency of advocacy across the country if a parent or a young person in Glasgow needs support there's the government law centre but what about elsewhere that's something we need to consider more deeply. What's important is that our service is a national service so we can access any parent or young person across Scotland. Sometimes there can be a misconception that if there's a child in the Highlands you know we are unable to assist them that's simply not true and that has to be really clear messaging. Now one of the concerns is how do we ensure that we're accessing all of these communities and again we we do hope that this session with the caseworkers for MSPs will be really helpful in that and ensuring that that information is being disseminated to their constituents. Just on that as well as engagement with the MSPs and you talked about training for local authorities are there central government agencies that could and should be supporting you more in your view to raise awareness? I think any awareness would be would be positive awareness absolutely I mean what specifically that would look like we have strong relationships although to be very clear we're not in partnership evidently with the tribunal and they will try and direct anyone who comes through the tribunal process who's unrepresented to our service one thing that I think would be extremely beneficial is when the local authorities send out their refusal letters some local authorities will include our details as a free service that parents can access others don't there is nothing that requires them to do so they require to make them aware of their appeal right but they don't require to make them aware of our free service and so that that is a piece that I think needs to be looked at and is a piece that I've raised at tribunal forums and in spaces from local authority around and that would certainly be something that I think could have quite a tangible impact the other issue and I can't say I can't say about every local authority but we have seen far too many local authorities whereby individuals have been sent out a refusal letter and it's not in their first language and now the local authority will have that information and they're receiving the letter through in English and that can mean if someone who speaks Polish receives this letter through they can inevitably miss their appeal right and so again that's something that I think needs to be looked at as a piece and some awareness and support around there. Thank you. Just to pick up on your first question been around the pandemic and that that effect that it's had in the demand for advocacy so like govern law my rights my say we provide independent advocacy for children and young people across the country so across all of Scotland we also have a children's view service that can support professionals to seek out children's views specifically so this is operating nationwide and I think the main pandemic effect was that the level of complexity in the referrals we see have increased where before we would maybe see a referral for an autistic child with an ADHD profile we now see referrals for children that are autistic and have an ADHD profile and who have not attended school for two years and who have severe anxiety and are still waiting for support from CAMHS and there might also be young carers because their parents have suffered over the last couple of years so the complexity is massive and it means that our advocacy service is working overtime because we can't just go in and provide advocacy for six weeks and then go away because that's not solving anything. We have a current waiting list for advocacy which is spanning nearly six months now and that's not that that doesn't fill us with joy it's not you know it's not a good thing that people are wanting your service in effect we were talking about it before we came in in effect what we are wanting to do is put ourselves out of jobs we don't want to be needed but the need for advocacy for children and young people is increasing and again my rights my say only operate within the 12 to 15 cohort but that's not to say that 16 year olds don't need support we've done within children's views we have a small pilot project with the ASN tribunal because the tribunal recognizes that younger children and children older than 15 really need to share their views for tribunal processes as well so we have a spot purchase agreement with them that ensures that all children regardless of their age and capacity are able to share their views in tribunal processes and I think that's massively helpful and the demand for that service and I think what we're hearing from the tribunal is that it's hugely helpful I think it gives us a clue as to the need for sort of wider advocacy support for for the cohort of children that are not sort of you know that don't have have the rights extended to them in the in the 2016 amendments to to the education act so I think there's something there to unpick maybe especially with the CRC fully coming in as an act in July I think we need to think very carefully about how we're going to deliver on not just article 28 and 29 around the rights and aims of education but also article 12 the right to have your views heard and for those views to be given due weight I think we're we're doing what we can I think the commitment from Scottish government to my rights my say and to have this as a function the same with government law I think it's admirable and I think it's really powerful and I think a lot of countries don't even reach us to the socks I'm from Denmark so I speak from experience but I think there's still a long way to go thank you thanks I absolutely agree with everything that's been said we've got colleagues here from two fantastic services that are funded by scotch government they have capacity issues marisa said you know they have a six month waiting list at the moment there are other ones that are done through services through the voluntary sector you've had evidence from salvers in mind room already they all have capacity issues and they all have gaps so as as Marie says they're focused on 12 to 15 year olds if a child under 12 wants to make a referral to the tribunal they technically can't thankfully that's not prevented them necessarily but technically can't 16 and 17 year olds who are still children who according to scott's law a UNCRC are still children don't have access to that service because they're treated as young adults not children or young people not children not given the same rights as other children so there's there's gaps there is not nearly enough advocacy support for parents there is fantastic organizations doing small amounts of work with limited budgets but I think there's a real gap and my biggest concern actually about ASL is the stories we hear and parents who've had the tenaciousness to get fight the system to get to the tribunal and when not all parents have that capacity looking after a disabled child is hard hard work you are battling on every front if the child has medical conditions you're also battling there how many children fall through the gaps because their parents don't have access to advocacy or legal support but you agree with everything that seven gods megan brought up parents and carers and the challenges that they face and I think it's making that advocacy and also mediation accessible for parents for parents and carers and supporting them through that process I think UNCRC provides a really good opportunity to kind of address some of that power imbalance and I guess under UNCRC but also under GERFEC the you know voices of children young people and families are central to everything so we need to be making sure that that's you know we can make sure advocacy and mediation is accessible so that that's made a reality Ben anything no thank you all that okay can I come now to bil kid please thank you thank you very much thank you very much to everyone because there's some really good depth of replies here however it is impossible in order to provide direction going forward following the pandemic and the difficulties that everyone has experienced and especially children with ASN as a panel seen good practice with schools and families working together to support re-engagement with learning so that we're actually getting something a symbol for others to work with. We've seen lots of great practice and I think you know it's very easy to get into quite a doom and gloom situation we see some fantastic relationship based practice happening in schools on a one-to-one level but also within school communities so I think that's one of the benefits of the presumption of mainstreaming it's obviously it's helping to sort of reduce some of the stigma and tackle some of the taboo of disabilities and additional support needs. Children in Scotland we deliver the inclusion ambassadors and they run and have run a couple of rounds of the success looks different awards which shows some really positive examples of good practice who I'd recommend going on the website and having look at that but really great relationship days of engaging children and young people helping to put the correct supports in place and make sure that they're able to access their best education. I guess there's a lot of that links to kind of culture change across schools and communities celebrating the success of individual learners and really making sure that that we're putting individual supports in place for learners so yes some really positive practice I think there yeah I can see that thanks very much David I can see Megan's looking to yeah likewise we've we've seen a lot of good practice we've spent quite a lot of time out and about meeting the children and young people in the last few months preparing our new strategic plan a lot of that involves work work done by schools but a lot of it also involves bringing partners into school so working with local third sector organisations community learning and development where there's still capacity in that for there so and it's it's around some culture change that's about more flexible approaches sometimes gets undermined by particularly in secondary schools by the concentration on attainment and senior phase there's sort of a pivot that happens which I think has been well rushed in this this committee before so I won't go over it again but there's there's also been there were schools that that genuinely did a lot of work around wellbeing and coming back where I think they're seeing the benefits of that now we were all changed by the pandemic and we're all changed in ways but none of us yet probably understand but the impact on children was just so much broader because the pandemic was a much bigger proportion of their lives the kids that coming into primary school who are needing more support they have spent their entire life in pandemic world you know they were they were babies and toddlers at the beginning or or I think this year the first ones who were born during the pandemic will start school so that the other thing that that I think I've seen some genuine you've got some had some evidence ready from the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapy about the role that they and other allied health health professionals can play in some of that that kind of catching up after the pandemic and they're showing they talked about a lot of flexibility in how they work and how that can change to address some of the the things that we're seeing coming through from the pandemic from children so there's lots of really good practice going on out there I just wish it was more consistent I'm really glad that you asked this question because I think there is it's very easy when we're discussing ASL and this whole policy landscape to focus on all the things that are not working and I think sometimes we need to check ourselves and remind ourselves that actually there is a lot of good practice there's a lot of commitment there are a lot of people who are working very very hard on a day-to-day basis to try to deliver so some of the things that we've seen that really worked after the pandemic is that extended level of flexibility a young person told us if you asked me to do much too quickly I'm not going to do anything at all it's not for lack of wanting but it's because we sometimes and I think after the pandemic there was an expectation that everybody would hop skip and jump out of bed and run into school and give their teacher an apple that's not the reality for a lot of the children we're in contact with the pandemic provided them with their first opportunity to really engage with learning you know to actually feel safe to actually feel able to hunker down and do their work because all the stressors all of the sensory overload all the the potential bullying all of the conflicts with with peers etc that was taken away and all of a sudden they were in their safe space it's not to say that that's the truth for all us and learners we also heard the opposite you know so it's not it's not a simple fix but one of the things that really have worked is that we have seen small pockets of schools trying to work on that hybrid model and trying to sort of ease children young people back into school rather than asking them on day one to go in full time and we I think there's a big overhang of the children who transitioned between primary and secondary during the pandemic there are again this is a quote from a child he said I'm part of a lost generation and we need a recovery plan so this is a young person who said this because everything that they knew all the structure all the stability disappeared and that whole enhanced transition that we know is so crucial for ASN learners that disappeared and they were asked to do too much too quickly and then the the result of that was and I think my rights might say that the average age for children and young people that come to us is around 13 and a half and that pretty much sort of corresponds to children and young people transitioning into secondary fighting trying doing their best and then slowly so what through s1 and s2 their attendance decreases decreases decreases decreases until eventually it's too hard and we know that if children stop attending school it's a very very difficult to get back so I think that the hybrid model and the sort of trying to support children to do what they can and building on that without expecting them to go from zero to 100 that's really crucial yeah I'll stop there otherwise I'll keep on going for another hour that's very positive Chloe did you want to say yes I think unfortunately with my role by the time someone contacts my office things aren't great I'm under no illusion though and when we're at tribunals we do get the benefit of hearing how the mainstream provision or the school that we're essentially not not comparing to but you know hearing evidence on and we do hear of some very good practice and I think that that is evidenced in the fact that we're seeing a lot of our children with additional support needs able to thrive in their primary school and it brings us back to the resource issue and we see primary schools being able to put in place more support because they have less pupils it's as simple as that and then we also see the pattern of when children move and transition into their secondary provision unfortunately attending starts to decrease until they become school refusers so I'm not the best for the for the good side of things but you know I am aware that it's that it's there and you know we're always cognising of that as well that we're dealing with only a certain lanes when looking at it that's a good positive attitude anyway thank you very much thank you very much Bill Kidd now I'm going to bring willy rennian he is joining us online here we are thank you willy thanks very much um he's actually just a little bit on that theme that you've just been discussing um what work you've done on the relationship between unmet asn need um but also absence and the behaviour in schools that we've all been hearing about what work have you done in that area I'm particularly anxious about making sure we get it right for every child in the class and sometimes I feel we're not yet achieving that in the round and I just wonder what work you've done in that area would Marie do you want to come in first um yeah I can I'll try to keep it short I feel like I'm talking a lot um so part of my rights might say part of what we're funded to do willy is to support local authorities to develop their commitment to participation and engagement strategies for children and young people this is a really important and vital part of our service and it's delivered by children scotland my rights might say has four four partners um so what we do with that work is we try to work with local authorities to focus on the things that are working the things that are maybe not working and the things that can be barriers to good participation practice and that could be things like relationship building but also around the language that we use again when we talk about children's behaviour in schools we often hear quite loaded language being used and it's not um it doesn't come from a bad place I think it just comes from a place of not always understanding how that affect the children that are being spoken about so that's one of the things we we cover within my rights might say is trying to avoid using words like challenging aggressive etc because it does leave a mark so that's part of our next level capacity building efforts and we also um like I said tried to try to build on on good participation practice we think we talk about things like intersecting barriers we know that inequalities and barriers to learning are cumulative so I gave an example before of a child being autistic having ADHD also potentially being a young carer looking after a poorly parent the more barriers you're facing the further removed you are from your rights and unfortunately for our services I think Chloe would agree the further removed you are from your rights the less likely we are to get in touch with these families so it's really important that local authorities understand and know about how how intersecting barriers affect children and young people and in turn that they make sure that they spread the words about about our services and that we are here to help can I come back on that money I mean can you give me some specific examples without giving names but can you give me some specific examples of young people that you've seen that things have changed for them and therefore the rest of the class as well I need to be careful because I don't want to give specific examples that could lead back to to a specific young person but I know that through our advocacy service very often what we see and again our cohort of children is often children who are in well it will usually be secondary school children and I think especially through our advocacy service what we can see is that children are finding it hard to access the support they really need but once they're provided with that opportunity to have advocacy involvement they're able to share their views with an adult who's not their mum or dad or their carer and who's not someone from education it's a blank canvas so advocacy is this wonderful blank canvas when nobody has any expectations and when nobody's taking anyone else's side so the child gets the opportunity here to just say what they want because children very often don't want to upset anyone they don't want to make anyone sad they don't want mum and dad to be disappointed and they don't want the school to think that they're not grateful etc but when we get the child and a one to one basis and we can sit down and we can find out what works for you sometimes that involves us being covered in glitter glue or playing Minecraft we don't really care what it takes to make that child feel comfortable and we invest a lot of time and energy in getting it right and once the child gets that chance to share their views in a very very safe space and realize that those views can be communicated onwards to school in a safe space and that the school is not just asking but also listening then we see like a real sense of agency in that child and we see them almost growing a couple of inches so I think we need to facilitate that that right to share your views and when we do that I think we can avoid these very adversarial dispute resolutions that sort of come later so my aim and my rights my say's aim is always to try to get in there as early as possible like I said nobody wants a tribunal it's not a nice it's not a very nice process as much as the tribunal is doing a wonderful job of making it inclusive the ideal would be to avoid getting it to that point so we do see and we have a lot of real-life examples of children who have access advocacy and through advocacy see that their voices and their views matter and are valued by education professionals by their parents and I think you need that independent service to provide that because otherwise there is that risk that the child is it's not feeling like it's entirely unbiased and impartial so through the remedy of advocacy I think we're getting we're getting somewhere can I bring in Megan and David on this theme thank you in terms of the links between behaviour on ASN need and I'll bring in a further topic and that's the work we did around restraint we're continuing to do around restraint indeed Daniel Johnson's bill has obviously now been coming through parliament that I think there's undeniably a link if you look at the work that Beth Morrison has done around restraint and that's a group that perhaps isn't coming through some of the other forums because that's almost always very young children I think eight is about the upper limit of the children the case studies that she's gathered and it's often the result of what gets labelled violent behaviour that the child ends up being restrained that's generally behind the the reason why the child is being restrained so I think there's a really strong link there you also see the link in terms of the number of children who are excluded who have additional support needs disabled children are disproportionately likely to be excluded but of the children with additional support needs who are excluded by far the largest group and in the most recent year statistics which I think is two years ago now it was around 4,000 were listed as having their additional support needs emotional sorry social emotional behavioural difficulties that label actually really concerns me because I think given the extent to which those children's behaviour is affecting their school life they're being excluded you can't get a much bigger impact on your school life than not being allowed to go to school that there is probably an unrecognised other additional support need category in there that somehow hasn't been identified so I think there's an issue around not recognising specifics about additional support needs and I think without recognising that there's an additional support need that it's additional support need because they have an autistic spectrum disorder or some other condition the diagnosis where you don't need a diagnosis to be given the support diagnosis are useful because they tell professionals what kind of support is needed access to diagnosis as we know is a big issue so I think there's a big link between all of those things particularly around very young children particularly around restraint David Mackay and then Chloe Minto please okay I'll keep it fairly brief so your question will be around unmet needs in schools and I think just want to highlight the value of people support staff in terms of helping to identify some of the needs individual needs of children young people in schools we've done lots of work with the inclusion ambassadors about what good people support staff looks like and we've also involved in the kind of Scottish government's pupil support staff advisory group and I know there's lots of work going on around that around learning frameworks and I think that's a big discussion which the committee has touched on in the past that would like to come back to but we know the individual support within schools is kind of crucial to achieving the best outcomes and also identifying needs within the classroom and we've seen since the pandemic I think a lack in that one-to-one support that is available within the classrooms and so I think if you're withdrawing that or there are challenges to delivering that then then that's going to result in more young people slipping under the net in terms of the behaviour and violence in schools so we've been involved in the summits children in Scotland but I think you know it's really important as as Megan talked to around reframing the discussion on that and looking at that kind of you know bad behaviour to distress behaviour moving shifting the dial I guess and the inclusion ambassadors also going to they identified this as an issue back early towards the end of last year and they're going to be doing a bit of focused work around behaviour and violence in schools which we'll be happy to share with the committee in the coming months in terms of how we remedy some of those needs that we see we do have a strategic litigation aspect of our service so what we do is we look at the data that we gather we look at the trends that we're seeing whether that be in terms of an area so it may be a local authority or it may be a particular issue that we're seeing one that we're seeing at the moment as exclusions as we've heard we're seeing many more both formal but more concernedly informal exclusions so unlawful exclusions our inquiries have almost doubled since 2018 in terms of what we're hearing from people about exclusions so what we can do is we can then decide okay well when we're gathering information from parents let's make sure that's a question that we ask them have they ever been asked to go and cool off that's an unlawful exclusion and we can start gathering that data and working out okay what is the best way that we can get this into a space where we're going to make some systemic change by raising litigation in that area so I think that's what it's really important and in terms of our inquiry helpline that even if a parent is not thinking about going forward with the tribunal that we have that discussion and that allows us to see how things are happening around Scotland and take action if necessary. Thank you. In the interest of time, Mr Rennie, I do need to move on to our next line of questioning from Ruth Maguire please. We are hoping to conclude this session at 10.30 so just as a reminder for everyone in the room thank you Ruth Maguire. I had questions around avoiding relationships becoming adversarial. I actually think that we've probably covered the things that can be done in terms of communication and also the important point about masking so I wonder if I could ask Chloe Minto about something that you mentioned the number of files that Governor Law Centre had dealt with and that there are only eight for care experience children. It would be lovely to think that that's because their needs are being met. I suspect there might be other challenges around that. Is that to do with obviously we spoke about capacity in terms of challenging local authorities?  Do you know why? I think the honest answer is I don't know. I can only speculate and I don't want to speculate. What we know is that we want to find out why and that's a big piece of what we're wanting to focus on right now is how do we access these children. It may be that their needs are being met. We doubt that it is but we're sure that there will be some whose needs are being met. I think that that comes back to some of the responses that we've seen that I was extremely disappointed to see some of the comments from local authorities about when our service becomes involved and that that can bring, I think, one of the words used was either confrontation or controversial approach. I found that very disappointing to read what parents are accessing as a legal remedy. Parents don't want to go to tribunal. We don't want them to have to go to tribunal. We make every effort that we can to negotiate and resolve cases. I think that one of the important things is that we are telling our clients to trust in local authorities, let's have discussions, let's see what we can do and we try to be very clear that that is our messaging. To see comments saying that there is a bias within the tribunal system as well, which I think is a grossly unfounded comment to make, extremely disappointing to see and I can categorically say is not the case. We have lost many cases if that makes things any better. We don't work in partnership with the tribunal and it's a fact-based. Each case is considered of its own merits. There's a piece around perhaps how our service is perceived that I'm trying very hard to work on and build upon in terms of whether local authorities feel they can contact us. Our inquiry line is available for local authority employees who can phone on a confidential basis to discuss matters. Unfortunately, one of the first things that will be said on our inquiry line when a local authority employee phones is—I'm really worried about my employers having this call. That's really disappointing. We immediately go into a kind of how do we protect the space. They are worried about phoning about a child who's got additional needs and voicing those concerns. Again, when it comes to witnesses coming to a tribunal, we see a hesitation when individuals work at a local authority to come forward. I have to say that it's starting to get better, and that's through us speaking with local authorities and trying to make sure that their employees feel comfortable going, because otherwise we will just cite them and we don't want to do that. We would rather that there is that engagement. I think that the independence of the tribunal service came across quite well in evidence last week. Does the Government's law centre know the demographics of the parents who are making it to you, if you like? I suppose that—I'd be curious about who's being missed out and who's not making it to your services. We have a very extensive monitoring process in terms of who's accessing our service, and we report to our funders every quarter—our funders being Scottish Government—every quarter. I saw some comments about who is accessing the tribunal. When I was reflecting on the statistics for today, I was quite pleasantly surprised to see that the majority of our cases are in Quintail 1 and Quintail 2. That's the majority of parents who are accessing our service. When we're looking at SIMD, it's very good to see that we are accessing them. However, I have a lot of information in terms of what we gather that I could provide to the committee in writing if that were to be of assistance. That would be very helpful. Megan and David might want to come in on those questions briefly. I just want to echo the concern that it was expressed in a submission to this committee that there may be some bias at the tribunal. I think that's a really concerning statement to have gotten into the papers that suggests that it might actually be out there more widely, and perhaps we don't know about it. In terms of looking after children, I suspect we're going to get a question about CSPs at some point. In terms of looking after children specifically, though, just in case the point gets asked, they are already receiving support from the education authority and the local authority in and other guys. It's the likelihood that they're eligible for a CSP is already higher, and yet we don't see that come through. I think it's really concerning. Effectively, they're in the position of challenging the people who also look after their living, day-to-day living, around their education. Their corporate parent is the person they're challenging, so it's really concerning how low the numbers actually are. We would expect to see them to be higher. Thank you, David. He's okay. Yes, I think that's the point of that conflict between corporate parent and employer was where Ruth Maguire was questioning around. I now move to Stephanie Callaghan. Thank you, convener, and it's really helpful to have heard from you already. I'm wondering, as well, local authorities. There's been a bit of talk about when the jobs have been done well, when they're actually putting wellbeing at the centre and they're listening and responding to the views of young people, their parents and carers and children. I'm wondering, are there some good examples of where this has been done well, probably in the early stages, if you like, and are there key things in common there, as well? We'd like to come in first on that one. Are you okay? They've answered for me, I don't think I'm best placed to comment on this. Okay, that's fine. Lovely. David? We have seen lots of positive examples all across Scotland, and as I said, the success looks different. Awards have done that, and I guess a key part of it is those relationships and communicate. We're talking about the positive relationship, so it's celebrating that success. It's that regular communication with home and making sure that, I think, we've spoken to parents who said, you know, when you have a child with additional support needs, you can feel constantly ground down by it, and it's really about celebrating the individual success and making sure that that's communicated. I think we could certainly provide details of individual schools that we can share as part of the success that's different. Awards who are, you know, having those positive relationships with parents and carers, so we're happy to provide some information and writing following this. I wanted to ask specifically about autism, so the tribunal application's been open rapidly rising, and 134 out of 202 cases, which is over 66 per cent, related to autistic young people and children. We've already heard some mention of masking and of sensory issues, of anxiety as well. I'm wondering, are there particular challenges then around autistic children that really there need to be strategies and supports in place for that particular group who seem to be very, very often coming to those tribunals, because obviously part-time timetable isn't really the big solution for it? To make a really brief point on that, because we've touched slightly on it before, but I think one of the main challenges for autistic children in our schools are that the schools are not set up for autistic children and young people, so we want children to have the opportunity to mainstream. We want them to be able to have an inclusive education where they can connect with their peers and where we all work towards this diverse society, where we realise that everybody has a potential, and I think that's a wonderful idea on paper, but I think there are physical problems with that, and that comes down to the space of the schools, Megan touched on that earlier as well, with this very open plan. It's down to details like busy walls, the noise that comes from the lighting, the busy corridors, the sort of mapping of a school, the fact that you come from primary school where there's an ability to support and to create safe small work spaces for children and young people, and you come without particularly big fanfare into a secondary environment where you are having to navigate, again the school is not wrapping itself around you, you have to wrap yourself around the school, and I think that is a massive challenge for autistic young people to make that transition for primary, even with enhanced transition with visits, the physical layout of the schools is quite complicated. In Scandinavia you don't start secondary school until you're 15 or 16, so for me I was quite surprised when I came to Scotland and realised that you're having to make that massive transition at an earlier age, and I don't know if there's learning to be harnessed there, I think the main point is that it's stressful for any child to transition from primary to secondary school if you're autistic then at a thousand. So I suppose just picking up on that as well then you talked about those safe small spaces that you get in primary schools, are there things that we could possibly be doing with our secondary city as it is just now to actually create those kinds of spaces and really improve things for people, I can see Megan wants to come in on that one. We did some work about 20 years ago, it's very very very out of date now, probably needs revisiting, possibly not by us, but around how we're building schools and I think that's something that would really be valuable to look at because there is this big jolt that comes at the transition to secondary school for a lot of autistic children, and the other thing is that I think people talk about how there are many more autistic children and I think actually we're realising there are many more autistic children, I'm very aware of a trend where of parents being diagnosed as autistic after their children are diagnosed, particularly girls, so particularly women being diagnosed in adulthood, so it's not something new but we're getting better at recognising it, that's good but now we need to respond to it. I mentioned earlier at 37% of children having additional support needs and I'm going to separate out the concept of disability from additional support needs but they may still have a disability but actually if schools meet their needs better they no longer have additional support needs because they're getting support automatically and that's some of the things that have been lost like use of classroom support systems which can even create that breakaway in the same space with how we layout our schools, how we build new schools, there are a lot of schools out there that were built under secondary schools that are built under there that aren't dissimilar to prisons apart from lack of bars on the doors, they're very hard noisy loud spaces with very bright lighting and that can be quite hostile. I'm not from Denmark but I actually went to high school there for a bit so I agree there's definitely also other things, I think there's maybe a much much bigger discussion on education that this transition from primary to secondary school at 11 or 12 it is quite a hard adult for a lot of children and it shows through the case work that's been talked about today so I think there's a lot more to look at there and one of the ways to do it is to talk to autistic children themselves and the ones who aren't in school as well as the ones who aren't in school about what is and isn't working for them. Thank you and can we move now to Ross Greer, thank you very much. Thanks, convener. At various points everybody on the panel has been very keen to talk about co-ordinated support plans, which you'll be delighted to know we can now do. The first instance, Collie, you mentioned just how important they are because they open up that route for legal redress through the tribunal. My first question would be given that they're like hen's teeth, it's like not 0.2 per cent of all pupils with a recognised additional need to have a co-ordinated support plan. Is it an issue that there are no other routes to access the tribunal? You can either fight really hard to get a CSP, the vast, vast, vast majority of children with additional support needs won't get one though or you can go for the somewhat nuclear option of trying to get a policing request and move out of a mainstream school into a special school. Is there an issue that CSPs are the only route to access the tribunal whilst staying in a mainstream setting? Yes, they are unless we're looking at disability discrimination claim, which would be under a different heading. There are different routes there in terms of co-ordinated support plans that you can go down through the disability discrimination route. However, in terms of co-ordinated support plan cases, again, it's helpful if you hear our figures just to get a real picture of what that looks like. In the past five and a half years, we have only had 58 cases going to the tribunal from our service in relation to co-ordinated support plans. That's inclusive of failure to implement. It may be the content of the co-ordinated support plan, but we are constantly in a state of, where are the co-ordinated support plans? What on earth is going on? They provide really rich remedies there, they provide really rich conversations, they engage parents, they engage children. The thing that we need to remember is that they are not discretionary, they must be in place. If you qualify, they must be in place, and there still seems to be a discourse that they have a child's plan. We hear it far too often that we use an individualised education plan or we use a slightly different plan. We do feel very fatigued with that, because we're not really sure how much clearer everyone can make it. The president of the tribunals has come out and made that clear. It's very clear in our legislation, so I'm not sure what local authorities are understanding about that.  Again, we offer training on that, so we would hope that if there were any confusion around that legislation, we would hear more inquiries about what the concerns are. We don't hear from anyone saying that we don't understand the legislation. I just want to follow up that point. The cynical answer for local authorities not understanding that is that they do, and they just do not want to implement CSP's child's plans in general, which are going to be less resource-intensive or at the very least mean that the local authority is somewhat shielded from the potential legal redress through the tribunal system. Do you think that the cynical explanation is perhaps a fair one, given the amount of information over such a long period of time that is being provided? I think that we need to be realistic in terms of when we hear information from parents about what's happening on the ground and about the perception of co-ordinated support plans, what they do is bind local authorities to doing certain things. Not only are we looking at a lack of co-ordinated support plans, but we're also then looking at, once we do get a co-ordinated support plan, being so broad that they are barely providing any enforceable educational objectives. In terms of the content of the co-ordinated support plan, that is so important to make sure that it's achieving the goal and the reason that that is the only statutory plan that is in place. I've heard of a special school where it was very clear that there were a lot of children who qualified for a co-ordinated support plan, and the information came to light that there were none that had a co-ordinated support plan. In that instance, I do feel that it was a genuine misunderstanding, but those misunderstandings have fatal consequences for the children who are entitled to this support. Children have a right to an effective remedy. That's not in the UNCRC, it's in the European Convention on Human Rights that's been incorporated for 16 years, I can't count today, 26 years in fact. The ASL Act is giving a very good right to remedy to a very small group of children via the tribunal. I think in terms of the co-ordinated support plans, I think the legislation is potentially not. I actually think it is being interpreted extremely narrowly. There is an interpretation of that legislation that would entitle far more children to co-ordinated support plans. Co-ordinated support plans are important because they're the only one where there is that right to remedy to go to the tribunal. In the absence of a different statutory plan, we could have a second statutory plan system that had a proper appeal process in the way that CSPs do. We don't. We have IEPs and we have child's plans and we have my world plans and we have other things in different local authorities, but none of them are actually delivering effective right to remedy. We've heard from SPSO that they're not reaching SPSO's complaints because SPSO, I think that probably belongs in the tribunal and it probably does. They're right, but they're not getting that right to remedy. That's why CSPs are important. We've had the same experience as Chloe. In our case, there was a residential special school and I think there may have been one CSP. There's children from a number of local authorities. In a residential school, local authorities were paying very large sums of money and these children were in those schools or residential as well as education. We can't imagine a scenario in which those children don't qualify for a CSP and yet none of them had it, or perhaps one. So we've come across that as well. They are in an entitlement. They're not happening. I can't even comment on quality of them. We see them so rarely. I know that when, in the past, we've had advice calls around it, it's been the first question, is there a CSP? It's always now. Does your office have a position on the solution then? We're all now incredibly, weirdly familiar with just how hard it is to get one, how few young people have them and the issues about getting one that's still not making a difference. I'd be interested, does your office have a position on the need for the legislation to change or is it an implementation issue or both? I think that our position is probably evolving because actually when we've looked at this it's worse than we thought and every time we look at it it's worse than we think. But there needs to be some form of right to remedy if a child is not getting their additional support they're entitled to, whether or not they meet the criteria for the CSP in whatever way it's interpreted. There's code of practice is being reviewed, there's an opportunity for that guidance to make clear how it should be interpreted and that it could broaden it. But whether or not they meet the criteria for a CSP, there has to be an avenue through which that right to remedy can be accessed by children and their families and it's not there. That potentially could go through the local authority complaints process for SPSO tellices that they're not getting as far as SPSO. They also need to know they have that right and I think a lot of people, what is a CSP is something you hear, they don't know they've got, even if they're entitled to one, they don't know they have a right to one and they don't know they have a right to remedy that attaches to it. So there's this massive hole in terms of access to right to remedy. She's okay, Megan's just made her point. I think she's reinforcing that David. I completely agree as well, I'll do it once more. More time, but clarity and accountability for families and children and young people, making sure that there's a consistency around parents and carers being equal partners. Can I just preach out then, just hopefully it's very brief, Megan, on the point around the revision to the code of practice. Can you foresee a scenario where that would address this issue sufficiently and mean that we wouldn't actually need a legislative change or is something more than changing or revising and proving the code of practice required here? There needs to be something that also addresses a right to remedy for children who don't meet those criteria and there will be children out there who don't. They're also just recognised that children move in and out of being eligible for a CSP over the course of their life so they might have considerable involvement from health for a period of time, which puts them into that category of one or more appropriate agencies or they might have input from a third sector organisation. That would also meet that criteria. I'm not sure it's being interpreted like that. We're sure it's not being interpreted like that because otherwise we would see more of them. Children can move in and out of eligibility as well. There's a real, real gap in right to remedy. This is one of the issues that comes to us most often. I know if I come to Liam Kerr for the final theme, he'll be picking up more on this as well. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. I have two questions, which I'll direct very specifically. Chloe Minto, what is the availability of legal aid and specialist solicitors in this area? Last week, we heard that the cost of representation at things like a tribunal is often prohibitive. There was a suggestion that it can sometimes be a challenge to find skilled legal representation specifically in this area. We're very fortunate that we're in the position that we have funding in place. Just to understand our service, we don't have a waiting list and we are unable to turn away any client. Anyone who has that right, we will take on, so there is no restriction there in terms of who would be able to access our service. If, for whatever reason we can't, if there's a conflict of interest, we would refer to another solicitor and make our funders aware and then they contact them directly. The only thing that we would really need to be looking at legal aid for would be in terms of any outlays, so that would be us instructing independent reports now in the entire time, in the entire two and a half years that have been a Government law centre. That's never something I've had to do, so it's not something. I think that that comes down to the fact that the set-up of the additional support needs tribunal and having those specialist members on the panel really does that rich evidential value in that understanding in terms of when we're asking questions. The other area that we would look at would be for translation costs, so if we needed to get interpreters involved. I don't see there being a restriction in terms of funds, but that's only to our service. Unfortunately, I can't comment on availability otherwise, because it's simply not something that we require to utilise in order to have people use our service. Just before I bring in Megan Farre on the same point, and I will be coming to you my second question anyway, can you explain to me, Chloe, just something that I'm struggling with from an answer that you gave earlier, because you said that the Government law centre would cover the whole of Scotland, but it's presumably based in Govan. How does someone in my area, in Aberdeen, who needs that representation or needs that support, how do they know and how do they access our support if they need it? I suppose that comes back to what I was saying about if the local authorities put it in the letter, that would make things a lot easier for us. Again, our information is on the tribunals website, as the national agency. We have things like a Facebook page that we try and get information out. We offer out to as many training events as possible, so we'll try and link in with people, like my rights might say, and ensure that we're attending as many parent groups if we get invited to them, then we will always go. We're very keen to get in the space and make sure that people know about us. We know that people from Aberdeen know about us because we have a breadth of cases across Scotland. It tends to be parents that spread the word. It really tends to be that once we have one parent of a child or young person with additional support needs, you tend to find that there are then parent groups, and then our name will get landed in one of those parent groups, and then we'll see a sudden flurry of people contacting us from the Highlands because it's made it into the parent group. The service would be the exact same, and we would adapt our service to whatever worked for that person. The fortunate position that we're in right now is that, by virtue of the pandemic, our working life has changed. Video calls are so accessible now. They tend to work very well for our clients, particularly when they have a child with additional support needs. It could be very challenging to get to and from the office, and Tribunals are also available online as well. Megan Farre, you might have something to add to that. I'll ask you a direct question on your submission. The commissioner's submission mentions the independent adjudication process, and I'm not convinced that that's particularly well used. At the risk of asking a leading set-up, I think that if one wants to avail oneself of that process, you have to apply to the Scottish ministers. Given all of that, why do you think that independent adjudication is not better used and how might you change it such that it is? I think that none of these processes are well used, and it's probably as much as anything an awareness issue. I'll have to have an admission that you've managed to ask me about the one bit of a response I didn't write. I think that's a consistent problem across all of the systems, and I'm pretty confident it's the same of that. It's simply just not aware of it. There is something about a duty that local authorities have to let people know, and it's not a legal duty, but it's a moral duty of letting children and their parents and carers know of the various rights to remedy that are available to them. It doesn't help that they're complex and it doesn't help that sometimes the information that they receive about them isn't always accurate. We've had examples and not specifically about the independent adjudication service, but about other ones where parents have been told, I know you can't go to a tribunal, for example, because actually that placing request you made wasn't really a placing request, so I think there's also some confusion possibly out there around professionals, even, about what the options are and how they're available. I can see Marie, it can come in and hopefully will save me slightly. I can come in ever so slightly, but again from the children's perspective, because it is one of the rights children can request independent adjudication as well, and we see it very underutilised. There are several reasons for that. One is that it's quite a complex and it feels like quite a legal process for children and young people. It doesn't feel like something that's particularly easy to do, and there's also the fact that it sort of has to traverse through local authority, and there is an opportunity for the local authority to almost veto that process. For children and young people, with additional support, needs to put in the effort to speak to a solicitor, to speak to an advocacy worker, to put themselves out there in a big way, only for that process to then be halted for them is painful, and it makes us, I mean we have barely seen any through my rights, my say, it's quite a rare occurrence that they come our way, but when we do, we haven't, the whole process, I don't, to my mind, I don't think we have seen the whole process through. Come back in on the question on legal aid, which you asked earlier. We do have a really long standing, I think, as long as the office has been in existing. We've had this position around children's right to access legal aid independently, so children can be assessed based on their parents' income. I think it's really important that children who want to exercise their rights are able to do so, and that that's not a barrier. I'm just repeating our call, but that goes across all areas, it's not just a relation to education, we're in a better position than others. As you see, we always have this canter towards the end of the session, where the convener gets a little bit twitchy at the top. I'd like to thank you for your unless it's very brief, David, because we are way over digital inclusion as well, and the equipment, internet access and skills that parents and carers have to access some of these remedy. I thank everybody for their evidence this morning, and I now suspend the meeting for 15 minutes to allow our witnesses to leave and for our second panel to come in. I welcome our second panel to the committee this morning. We have Dr Lynne Burnie, chair of the ASN network, association of directors of education in Scotland, who will probably abbreviate to ADES throughout the meeting for those tuning in. Anthony Clark, executive director of performance, audit and best value at Audit Scotland. Nicola Dickie, director of people policy at COSLA. Kerry Drunan, education service manager, additional support needs inclusion at Falkirk Council. Vivian Sutherland, principal psychologist and educational psychology service from Fife council. Welcome and thank you for giving up your time this morning and coming along and for your written submissions that you've provided us ahead of the meeting, it's been very helpful. We will move directly to questions from members, and can I bring in Pam Duncan-Glancy, please? Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. Thank you for what you've submitted in advance, as the convener says. I just have a fairly open question to start with, and that is why do parents feel they have to fight all the time? What do you think the root cause of the difficulties they and children and young people are facing are? Who's the first on that big opener for 10? Vivian Sutherland, make a start on that one. That's a big question, and I know that that was a theme that came through in the Morgan review that families talked a lot about having to fight and to battle and so on. My experience is working as a local authority educational psychologist and the principal educational psychologist is that we work really hard to prevent families having to feel that they battle, but a small number definitely do feel that that's the case. Schools and services in schools do a really good job of trying to intervene early with the vast majority of families who have concerns about how their children's needs are being met, and those tend to be resolved at a relatively low level. Our principal is always to try and resolve issues at the lowest level of intervention possible. There are a number of staged approaches that would involve educational psychologists often being brought in to help mediate where there are disagreements about needs. Education managers often get involved in that as well. I do think that we're all disappointed and concerned when something progresses to the point where families feel that it can no longer be resolved by the local authority and we end up having to be engaged in the tribunal system, for example. In my experience, I don't feel that all families need to battle. I think that we need to listen really carefully to the ones who do feel that they have that experience to see what could we have learned and what could we have done at an earlier stage that would have made them feel differently about that. I know that a lot of families would talk about resourcing and needing to have more staff in schools and so on, but sometimes if we can work really well and sympathetically with families we can actually dig up that there are other things that we can do to ensure that their children have a good experience of school where they like to attend, they go in every day, they have a satisfying experience, they do make progress and, to be honest, that's what we find most families really, really want. We tend to try and set a shared goal with families so that we can achieve that. We're not always successful and we try to learn from that, but I would say that in the vast majority of cases we resolve things so that they never get to that crisis point. Others will have an additional view, I'm sure. I would share Vivian's view on that, and our work with our local authority representatives would always be around meeting parents where they are, listening to their concerns and resolving their concerns as early as we possibly can. Given that there are 37 per cent of children with additional support needs in our schools, I think that local authorities are relatively very successful in doing that. Our headteachers and seedle leaders in our school take the responsibility first and foremost to discuss concerns with parents and put in place adjustments and remedies at the school level to try and resolve any concerns that they may have. A small number of parents and carers do not feel that their concerns are listened to, and local authorities have in place a number of staged interventions that parents can access to have their concerns raised. In my experience, when listening to some of the complaints or some of the tribunal cases that come in over my desk today, often what is at the heart of the issue is a breakdown in communication, a breakdown in relationships. I think that that was very much came through the Morgan review, and I think that there are things that local authorities could do better and are trying to do better to ensure that our communication with parents and carers is written in a language that they understand, that they understand their rights and that they understand the remedies that are available to them, but first and foremost that we put relationships at the heart of all of that work. As Vivienne said, listening to when we are not getting it right and having a learning approach to those cases is really important at a local authority level and indeed at an address level. I think that there are a number of examples that I could give you as to how local authorities are trying to take aspects of that Morgan review forward. Thanks very much and I suppose just to add to what colleagues have already said. I mean that local government on large is committed to the mainstream agenda that has been in play for over 20 years. Vivienne just said that 37 per cent of children, more than that in some areas, have additional support needs. That means that the mainstream offer for many children has been augmented and added to make sure that we are meeting their individual support needs. I think that there is something about the communication around how additional support needs are met within the mainstream. I also think that there is no doubt that budgets are challenging for local government. Education has been prioritised and there is a different committee coming into that, I am sure, but that does not mean that all of the other wraparound services that support our children and young people to live the best lives possible have not been under sustained pressure and I suspect that is some of the stuff that we might come on to talk about. The other thing that I would say is about that communication point. Complaints and tribunals across all of the public sector should always be resolved at the lowest possible level. We should not need to get to the point where we have tribunals that are very adversarial and I am sure that is what Angela Morgan heard when she spoke to people. I think that we need to make sure that the messaging coming out of the system makes it clear that mainstream education is the best place for as many children as we possibly can. I think that we have to recognise that it will take more than schools to make sure that children and young people fulfil their full potential and enjoy their time in our education system. Lastly, we need to think about what is the sweet spot around the funding that is available for schools and education support. I appreciate that and that brings me nicely on to the next question. Do you believe that local authorities are taking a rights-based approach? How is that reflected in resource allocations for pupils with complex needs and supporting families and young people to contribute to and challenge decisions of the local authority? Local authorities are incredibly aware of the need to balance the rights of all of our children and young people within our schools. One of the issues with mainstreaming of additional support needs and the length of time that it has been like that is that it is incredibly difficult to track through a local government budget exactly what proportion of spend is going to children who have additional support needs. I do not think that that is the right thing because it is part of the mainstream when we have integrated all of the support but I do think that it is difficult to track that. I think that the other point is around about the rights-based approaches that it takes time, it takes training, it takes understanding to make that happen. I do think that there is more that we can be doing in that but I do think that we recognise it. I do not think that we always get it right but I do think that we need to spend more time thinking about how we build that rights-based approach in but I am sure that colleagues will be aware of what goes on in individual schools, etc. Kerry, do you want to come in on this? Yes. There is a lot of training going on and there is a lot of understanding in Falkirk. We have a lot of what we call rights-respecting schools and it is to ensure that our young people are having their voice heard very actively, that they are being involved in key planning decisions and that filters all the way down to the planning and assessment for meeting children's wellbeing. If we think about the team around the child, we work really hard to make sure that the young person has the voice and the decisions that are happening around and about them and it starts right from that planning and assessment that they can talk about their wellbeing needs, they can comment on the plan if it is going to meet their needs and if it is things that will help them. From that rights-based point of view, it is about putting the child at the centre of all that planning and assessment. Our schools are very good at doing that and are very clear about doing that, but now that it is enshrined in law, there will probably be a need for more training and making sure that all of our young people's rights are being protected and our young people are empowered to use them. For example, we have a lot of work with the My Rights My Say organisation and we promote that amongst our staff so that our staff can promote it with our young people. We do not have a lot of young people using it, but the ones that have found it really useful in getting their voice on the table and being able to ask for the support that they think they want and that would benefit them most. Although there is probably still a long way to go, I think that we have strong foundations in place to protect and promote our young people's rights. I am not in a position to comment on the operational practices within local authorities or educational authorities, but you asked a question around human rights-based budgeting and the allocation of resources. The evidence that we see is that local authorities are adopting a range of different approaches to engage with communities to understand what the impact of the difficult choices they are making might be on different community groups. In some cases, people with protected characteristics, but it seems to us that there is still more to do to develop that practice. As the UNCRC comes into law, I think that that will pose a particularly new set of challenges for local authorities and, indeed, the Scottish Government. That seems to be an emerging area of practice in terms of budgeting and budget allocation, both at the strategic level and also how resources are deployed within individual local authorities or other public bodies. It feels like a complex area. That segues on to the next theme of questioning from Ben Macpherson. You have teed that up perfectly for my next question to yourself, please. I am happy to hear from others, of course, thereafter. We are interested in the challenges for the Accounts Commission and Audit Scotland to understand spend on pupils with additional support needs and the outcomes for those people. That is, indeed, a difficult area. In the papers that you have seen at the committee, there is some attribution of spend to additional support needs. It seems to us that that does not really catch what is going on. It is relatively straightforward to identify expenditure on special schools, whether we use that term and accept that term—that is what many people call them—and central support teams. What I think is very difficult to account for and understand is the contribution that many other staff are working with children with complex needs, what the cost of that support is. I think that it is important to recognise that that is not just a local authority question. Health, the third sector, housing and other partners have an important part to play here. We think that it would be really important to try and understand what those contributions are, but the way in which budgets are allocated and accounted for does not allow that to happen. There is a real challenge here, I think, in understanding how complex services that involve different partners, what resources are being deployed in those areas? Given that the Accounts Commission generally produces its analysis on a local authority by local authority basis, trying to get a holistic view across the country for yourself is quite a challenge. You will know that we are currently thinking about doing a specific piece of performance audit work in that area. Obviously, we want to wait and see what comes after your inquiry to help us to think about the scope and shape of that work. If we decide to do performance audit work to follow up on the issues that you identify in your inquiry, the level of funding allocation, how funding is deployed will be an important part of that work. I said to you earlier, Mr McPherson, that it is difficult. It does not mean that it is impossible. We would want, when conducting any piece of performance audit work, to try to understand the allocation of resources, not just by local authorities, but by the contribution that partners are making as well. Can I bring Bill in before you move on to your next, is that a kicker? Yes, sure. I think that Nicola Dickie also wants to answer. I think that it will make sense. Bill Kidd, please. Thank you very much, convener. I will try to make sense. In terms of spend per pupil, as we have been told, in mainstream settings, it is actually increasing. How is this squared with the common perception—I think that it has been covered a wee bit already—that resources for children with complex needs are actually diminishing? That is the perception that many people have. Do you know how you can square those two together? Nicola Dickie. I think that it goes back to what I touched on on my first answer. First of all, it is the communication of that. The fact that you cannot actually take the budget and carve it up and say x amount went for additional support needs is because so much of it is hardcoded across the mainstream provision. We think about initial teacher training. We do modules in there where initial teacher training covers that, but we do not then split a teacher's time up when they are actually in the class working with people to say that you spend x amount of your time and therefore that amount of the pound goes against that. I think that there is the communication issue around about exactly what is going on there. I think that, as Ms McPherson's question touched on there, the further out from the child you start to zoom that lens, the more and more complex it comes to what is wrapped around that child. That is from teaching resources that are available to the support staff that are available to the housing staff, to the local authority staff, out to the third sector, out to the health service. It is something that we have always struggled with, as we have integrated services not just in this field but others, about tracking that pound. I agree with Anthony that it is an issue. It is not impossible, but it will take thinking about outside the box. Some of it, I am afraid, is not going to be hardfaxing figures. It is going to be, how does that feel in a classroom? How does that look when you are doing some of that? I suspect that that is where our auditors would be coming at, as in saying, well that is all very good and well booked. It is an issue that we are aware of, but it can be done. If we crack it for this, I suspect that there will be other parts of the public sector coming in asking us what we did.  My point would be that we need to make some assumptions around budget spend and resource allocation. There will be a high degree of uncertainty around that, but it does not mean that we should not try to do it. As Nicolaus said, that could be an important test case of understanding how resources are deployed to deliver complex outcomes, which might be useful learning for the Scottish Parliament, the local government and other public bodies as well. For me, we have to take into account that, within Scotland, our additional support needs legislation and definition is very broad. It takes in at a large number of our young people, 37 per cent of our children and young people in schools. In my own local authority, we have 51 per cent in Edinburgh of children and young people with additional support needs in our secondary sector. That is just tipping over half of all of the children. The range of needs and the children can dip in and out of additional support needs, depending on their particular family living conditions at a particular time or health condition at a particular time. We work across the range of children who have dyslexia, which is difficulty with reading and spelling, to the more complex needs that need full-time medical care. Distinguishing aspects of the roles and supports that we have in our school system to meet those needs will be very difficult. We have a very progressive and inclusive approach in Scotland that essentially makes every part of the workforce that works in education and works with education have inclusion at the heart and equity at the heart of their role. It is the responsibility of all our headteachers, all our teachers, all our support staff and all of our central staff within education to meet the needs of children and young people and those with additional support needs. It is always difficult when asked by auditors and external people from a local authority point of view of how much is your spend on additional support needs. We see the meeting of the broad range of additional support needs within the definition that we have in Scotland. It has been everyone's responsibility. I will just own up and say that I cannot possibly answer a question about needs-led budget, so I am glad that other people could. However, I would wholeheartedly agree with the points that have been made. Within education, we very much see ourselves working in partnership with other key agencies such as health to meet additional support needs, to work with family support services to meet additional support needs. To try and single out the spend that only education makes is quite tricky. It would be a complex issue to look at the wider budget and issues, but I think that it would be useful. To try and provide some kind of an answer to that very good question about why does it feel as if there is a message that the spend has gone up but resources have never been tighter, I think that we are in a really tricky stage just now where the identification of additional support needs has never been better or more effective. We are very, very good at identifying what young people's needs are right from across the whole range of the ASL Act spectrum. As Lynn has said, some of those needs will be complex and long-term, some of them will be short-term and may relate to, for example, issues of bereavement or family break-up through a parent going into prison. All of those things fall under the description of additional support needs. That is one of the reasons why there are such high proportions of additional support needs of young people in school, because we recognise now the range of different needs that there are. Not all of those needs need the same level of intensive support and intervention, but they do need recognition. One of the things that is being tricky—I think that it is getting increasingly tricky and it has been exacerbated by Covid but I am not blaming Covid although it was a trigger point—is that the kind of explosion in needs and family concerns about their children have largely been centred on schools since Covid, and it is meant that a lot of services have really had to work at the kind of crisis intervention high level. What we are very keen to do—and we have talked about this within ASPEP—that is the principal educational psychologist's organisation with ADES in collaboration—is that we are very keen to pause, look at what is going on and see how we can move back to a focus on early intervention and prevention, because we know that that is where we really need to invest time, resources and expertise in order to intervene early, to support families before things become a crisis, to support children in school, to ensure that they have the building blocks to be able to engage in that environment, and to do that we need our partners on board with that as well. I cannot speak for them, but I do hear from the partnership work that we do locally in Fife that they feel the same pressures to be intervened at a crisis intervention level when they really want to get in at the ground floor to be able to intervene before things get to that stage. I think that the whole landscape is really complex. Sorry if I have gone beyond the scope of the question there. Kerry, from our Falkirk perspective, what are your thoughts on that question? Yes. There are different ways of looking at it. If you take a whole systems approach, the children who are leaving our schools either at P7 or S6 have probably got less need than the children coming in at P1 and S1. I can understand why people feel that there are growing needs at the more complex end of the spectrum, and we have still got the same resource. If you are splitting that equitably and fairly, it might feel a bit reduced, certainly in Falkirk. Before the pandemic, we had started to increase our specialist provision spaces, especially the ones that were attached to our primary schools. That was to be based on the projected five-year needs and where we are is a new projection of need. It is about using your resources creatively. Our schools are amazing at using resources creatively, but they are taking a very individualised learner approach. They are looking at what would meet that learner's needs best. It is becoming very individual and child-centric. Therefore, they will then ask for more support and resources. It is about how we manage those requests and how we manage that support. Is the support going in the right place? As the Morgan review said, we have to reimagine our mainstream, certainly in Falkirk. That is where we are now. We are reimagining what our stage 3 provision looks like. That is for our children who require more complex external agency support. They seem to be growing in numbers, so we are just making sure that we have the right resources going to those children at the right time and at that early intervention and prevention level. We have already done that with our specialist provisions. Our standalone schools have seen a big shift in the complexity of needs. They have changed their curriculum, their model and our mainstream schools are now looking at what needs to change and grow in our own curriculum and model that allow us to meet all the needs of the children that we have come into us. That is the kind of position that we are in Falkirk. The resources are not shrinking, it is just that we need to look at it and help it to become more flexible again. Ben Macpherson, back to you. I am moving on to a wider question. How does a staged intervention work in practice be interested in any feedback that panellists want to give us on that? Does a child or a young person have to have unmet need at stage 1 before being considered for greater levels of support? Most, if not all local authorities, will have a staged assessment model in place. They do dither across local authorities, as you would expect. They are based in legislation, they are based around good practice, most talk about universal level of support. As I suppose to take a step back at the moment, they are there to allow local authorities to help support local authorities' plan for resource to assess and plan resource and to assure that the principle of least intrusive intervention is in place. That is that the small adaptions to the environment, the curriculum and the learning can meet the majority of our children's needs. We talk about that being universal. There are increasingly intensive interventions as we move through the staged assessment approach within a local authority, often with special schools and outwith schools being at the highest level of intervention that we would want for our children and young people. The principle is that the majority of learners' needs will be met within universal level, that is within the classroom, through adaptions that the teacher can make, through their practice, their differentiation and their learning environment. The aspect that is really important is that those least intrusive interventions should always be put in place first and foremost before you would jump to more intensive interventions, such as removing the child from the classroom, removing the child from school, adapting the curriculum significantly. That is the basis of our staged assessment models. I would disagree that that leads to unmet need in the majority of cases. It should ensure that the majority of children's needs are met in the classroom through differentiation and minor adjustments and amendments being made to their learning. Really, they need to be put in place. They need to be tried, tested and reviewed over a period of time before more intensive interventions would get in place by the class teacher or, indeed, the school, before moving to local authority interventions such as smaller peripatetic outreach teams, intensive one-to-one support, access to educational psychology support or access to the many third sector partners that we have in our schools to support children. I hope that answers your question. Just for clarity, I was not saying that the child had to have unmet need. The question was does the young person or child have to have unmet need at stage 1 before being considered for greater levels of support? The answer to that is no. I was saying no. The journey into another stage is much more complicated and determined by a variety of factors. Is that what I should interpret from your answer? Yes. Those needs, first and foremost, must be identified and assessed in the classroom by the class teacher as part of their planning for the class. Vivian, it is Sutherland. I agree absolutely with Lynn's description. Of course, every local authority does it slightly differently. The way that you have summarised that is absolutely what I would agree. We have worked really hard to try and make it so that there are no barriers put in place, for example, from moving from universal to additional. It is a collaborative and agreed approach with the family that there has been a need identified. We have tried some low-level interventions. Some of those have been successful to an extent, some of those have not, but we recognise that there are still needs that we need to further address, so we might put in additional levels of support to do that. I find that in all schools, staff are very proactive at assessing young people's needs and identifying any concerns at an early stage and putting in support within their own gift before even coming to the stage of necessarily needing to formalise those in a plan. Things that classroom teachers will do just within their own teaching consultation that they will have with their own learning support staff to do small interventions to see whether that can make a difference without having to be any kind of more intrusive intervention or anything that might make the child feel singled out in the classroom. However, as soon as there are any concerns like that, the families are always involved in knowing what the school is putting in place. Certainly what we do—I cannot speak for every local authority, but I know that every local authority does a version of that—is that we try to have very clear, straightforward, simple, understandable paperwork to write down what it is that we have identified in terms of what those child's needs are, what the parents' views on that are and what we are doing about it, so that when we come back together we review those interventions using that paperwork, where the child and the parent both have the opportunity to have their say on that as well. That document is carried right through from children who have just the smallest need that needs to be met, right through to children who are very complex needs. The plan can just become bigger or smaller, depending on what needs to be in it. I think that the stage approach is really important because we need to be able to identify what we have at each level that we can put in place, but I think that it also is characterised by being very flexible and very fluid. We try really hard to make it so that it is not bureaucratic and that there is not a sense of you have to achieve this many points or be failing at this level for us to go to the next stage. It is not about that, it is about trying to identify what is still not working yet, what else can we do. That is our approach across local authorities, and I can speak for how we deliver that in life. I suppose that the staged intervention is a framework and a tool. It just enables consistency and understanding that should be understood across all of our partners, our parents, every young people, everybody can access it and understand it. It is used as a strength-based approach rather than a deficit model. Again, it is based on what does the child need to allow them to thrive at this time. Depending on their circumstances and what their needs are, it is not a linear journey from universal to stage 4 because there are so many things that can happen to our young people that they might need an intervention from a specialist agency, which is very clearly at stage 3 or stage 4 for a short amount of time or for a longer amount of time. The model is flexible, children can move in and out of those stages, but it is a strength-based model. It is meant to be what is the strength, what is going well for the child, what has the child got within them that is going really well and where do we need to offer additional support? It is not about whether that is an unmet need or whether that is going really badly. We are moving away from that kind of negative language and way of looking at young people and saying, what are their strengths, what do they need that would really help them at this time. It is that right support at the right time at any stage of the model. Our model, we map so much information to it, we map our CLPL training to it so that it teaches and practitioners a career-long professional learning. All of the training courses that are on offer from all of your partners is a partnership approach. Everybody can look at the stage intervention model and say, those are other strategies and supports that I can put in place for this young person because it looks like what they require at this time. That is to do with the planning at the team around the child, but it is a framework and a tool. I think that our practitioners find it really useful. It gives that consistency of approach across all of our schools wherever our young people may be. It gives a bit more confidence for our parents. Our parents, we shared that with them at a parent forum recently and they were really interested in it and wanted to know more about it. It gave them a sense of confidence in the system as well that there is a framework that supports and can happen and that they can be empowered to know about it as well. They can ask for it if it is not happening, so it is part of that. All three of you, for that clarity and those explanations, are very helpful. Thank you, Ben Macpherson. Michelle Thomson, please. Good morning, panel. Thank you for joining us. We know that supporting ASN needs requires a multi-agency approach. I will come to your self-carry first for obvious reasons, given that I represent Falka East. I am interested in how you ensure your strategy allows for the inclusion of all key stakeholders, health boards, social work and so on. I suppose that what we do is we use what we call a locality model or a closer-to-home model, so we try to explain it. We have clusters. In a cluster, you would have a high school and all its associated primaries. Each cluster has a named person to go to in an agency. After Covid, we developed our social work teams to map into specific clusters, so there was always a named team manager that schools could go to as well as a specific duty worker for social work. The duty worker might attend the tack if there wasn't an allocated social worker, sorry, the team around the child, the meeting. We have a model where we have a service level agreement with our allied health professionals for speech and language services and physiotherapy. We have named clinicians who are mapped to that cluster, who are there at that first point of call, so a school can ask for advice. They have a named person that they can contact immediately. As do the families, we also extend that to our educational psychology. We have a link to every school. In my team, I have what we call additional support needs advisers, and my advisers have two clusters that they look after and work with. There is always a clear link for a parent to know who to contact, for the school to know who to contact, for those people to be the first people to be invited to the team around the child to offer assistance and support. I know that with the speech and language partners and our physiotherapy partners, a new model that we brought about in the