 I welcome everyone to the sixth meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2017. Can I please remind everyone present to turn their mobile phones and other devices on to silent for the duration of the meeting? We've received apologies from Gillian Martin, MSP, as she's another committee in relation to her member's bill. Claire Adamson, MSP, is attending a substitute. Also Fulton McGregor gives his apologies, as he's taken on well this morning. Agenda item 1, the first item of business, is a decision on whether to take a number of items meeting in private. Item 3 is consideration of a paper by our EU reporter Gillian Martin. She's content that we consider the paper in her absence. Are members content that we take item 3 in private? Thank you. Item 4 is a review of the evidence that we will hear in additional support needs. Are members content that we take item 4 in private? Next week we will take evidence from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills on school education. Are members content that we consider an item reviewing the evidence that we hear from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills in private? Thank you. We now move on to agenda item 2, which is a round table discussion on additional support needs. Before we start, I wanted to put on record my thanks to everyone who has contributed already to the committee's work in ASN. We've received hundreds of submissions and the committee undertook some excellent focus groups last month where, among other things, ASN was discussed. I'd also like to personally thank Dalkeith High School, who hosted a visit for myself, Ross Thompson and Ross Greer. Some tables are intended to promote more of a conversational style of evidence gathering as the committee is scoping the issues relating to ASN at this stage. That said, I'd remind everyone to indicate to me or the clerks if they would like to speak and I will then call you. I suggest that we start off by going round the table and briefly introduce ourselves. I'm James Dornan, MSP and I'm the convener of the committee. I'm Sally Cavers, I managed the enquire service based at Children in Scotland. I'm Kenny Graham, representing the Scottish Children's Services Coalition. Ross Greer, MSP for the West of Scotland. Bridgian Lochhead, MSP for Murray. Carol Gilmar, parent and foster care at Children with Additional Support Needs. Shan Willing-Turf, parent and foster care for a wee boy who also has additional support needs and I'm also a trustee on the Board of Kindred. Daniel Johnson, MSP for Edinburgh Southern. Ross Thompson, MSP for North East of Scotland. Colin Beattie, MSP for Midlothian North and Musselborough. Sam Rinshire, principal teacher of pastoral care, Barnum in High School Glasgow. Sylvia Hawkingey, I'm a support for learning instructor in Glasgow City Council and I'm also an education unison steward. Claire Adams, MSP for Motherwell and Wishaw. Tanish Grill at MSP for Shirtland. Sylvia, you don't need to press your button, they'll do it for you, it's automatic. Sheila Riddell, Professor of Inclusion and Diversity, University of Edinburgh. Colin Crawford, Head of Inclusion, Glasgow City Council. Liz Smith, Mood Scotland and Fife, MSP. Thank you very much. Before we start on the first theme, I understand that Sally Cavers from Inquire attended a session hosted by the commissioner for children and young people yesterday, which focused on additional support needs, as he is considering further work in these areas. I wonder if Sally might give us a flavour of any key points coming from that session. Overall, there was an agreement during the session that the legislation is good but there are concerns about its implementation. There was discussion about the many layers of legislation and policy that applied to supporting children with additional support needs that are making it increasingly complex for practitioners. There was a general sense in the room that the system is under pressure. In terms of where things are being stretched too far, the main issues that were raised were about inconsistency in implementation in different areas and accountability. There were some points that made a lot of fault to parents in terms of accountability, and therefore there were concerns about parents who are marginalised and possibly unable to take forward or take action required to access their child's rights. There was discussion about resources and their sufficiency in the additional support for learning system. There was some discussion about transition, not just transition from school but between primary and secondary for children with additional support needs, particularly around planning and preparation. We had some discussion about exclusion from school. Some of the attendees were expressing concerns about formal and informal exclusion, particularly of the recording of informal exclusion and the provision of education, while children and young people are not in school. We had some discussion about participation and considering the participation of children and young people in all elements of school life, such as being included in trips, in play and not segregated from their peers. We also talked about how the additional support for learning act interacts with GERFICT and the Children and Young People Act. There was some anecdotal evidence discussed in terms of schools and authorities considering or acting as if GERFICT and child's plans replaced the additional support for learning act and co-ordinated support plans. Just in terms of recommendations and levers of change, it was expressed that we need to do more to hear from the users, from children and young people, about their experiences of service. We discussed training and the capacity of the workforce to take on the training that is required. Finally, we talked about leadership and the strength that is needed to take forward the aspirations that we have for children and young people. I would like to start off with an issue that has arisen a number of times in our evidence sessions, which is whether there are differing approaches taken by local authorities that might touch on the inconsistency that was mentioned there. Professor Riddle submitted a briefing to us, including on local authority variability, so I wonder whether you would like to start this discussion, Professor Riddle. It is quite clear that there has been a massive expansion in the proportion of children identified as having additional support needs. That is probably to do with more and more categories being counted rather than more children being identified. Saying that a child has additional support needs certainly does not mean that that child is getting additional support. We might say that it is very good at identifying more and more children, but we have to be cautious because we do not know anything at all about the quality of education that is getting as a result. There is obviously a huge amount of local authority variation. Overall, we know that you are more likely to be identified as having additional support needs if you live in an area of deprivation, but when we look at the local authority variation, we find that it does not seem to be related to this very obviously. For example, Aberdeenshire, a rural authority, identifies 35 per cent of its children in school as having additional support needs more than a third. That compares with North Lanarkshire, one of the poorest local authorities, that only identifies 6 per cent. We have to ask carefully what is going on there. There is also a problem because there is local authority variation, not only in the identification of ASN, but also in the decision to allocate co-ordinated support plans, CSPs, to children. We find that that was already much lower than the proportion of children who had record of needs. That was about 2 per cent. Now, only about 0.4 per cent of children have a CSP. That is a very important document because it is the only document that has statutory underpinning that gives access to various sorts of appeal, proper assessment and so on. We find that it is very concerning that you are much more likely to get a CSP if you come from an advantage background than if you come from a disadvantage background. I will stop there, but there are quite a few issues. Before I open it up, was there anything that came out of why there was such a disparity and also why those from advantage backgrounds are more likely to get a CSP? Is it because parents have more influence and more articulate? Local authorities, even though they should not do this, have tried to discourage the use of CSPs. They are very concerned, partly because of their resource constraints, of allocating funds to individual children. It is always the more determined parents because it is really hard to take on the system who manage to get that provision for their child to insist on proper assessment. We know that many of the children who have additional support needs come from areas of deprivation. It is to do with poverty, with having parents who are struggling to cope with masses of social stress. Those are the very parents who cannot take on the system. The system should be supporting those parents but is not doing so very adequately. I think that that is reflected in many of the statistics. Local authority must identify those who have additional support needs and those who need a co-ordinated support plan. However, in practice, that is not what happens. I am quite a confident parent and am able to go forward. I have asked for that for my children that I look after. However, that was never offered. Both my foster sons have additional support needs. They are placed out of their local authority. They have lots of different agencies involved. It should have been automatic that that was put into place. As you see, parents who are struggling and are looking after those children, if they do not have the confidence, they are not going to be able to come forward and do that. That is something that needs to be addressed. Local authorities are reluctant to put co-ordinated support plans into place because they know that they have to take action points for children. I would like to add to that that both my children, my birth child and the reboy that I look after both have CSPs and, on both occasions, the local authority. Two separate local authorities tried to put me off. One local authority, we had to go to tribunal. He was looked after child. He also has a disability. He was absolutely entitled to a CSP, and it went right to the day before tribunal, before somebody came back and said, I am really sorry. What a waste of everybody's time and money. These documents are important. What you were saying about parents who are really driven are going to go and fight for it, but not everybody knows that they can. If they ask and they are told by someone on authority to know that they are not eligible, then often they will go away. I was fortunate that I had kindred behind me, who directed me to Government law, who fought it on our behalf. I think that services like kindred would be really useful throughout Scotland. Just now they are very centred in Fife and Edinburgh. There is a satellite in Glasgow, but for parents to have someone there who can fight their corner, who can advocate for them, and it takes some of the pressure off the parents as well. Thank you, Daniel. You wanted to come on. I just really wanted to maybe try and step into the next level of detail and the variation. I mean, obviously, one of the things that will probably come back is that the ASN captures such a huge spectrum of different underlying things. Is there any patterns amongst the individual conditions? Is this a case where some local authorities are really good at identifying dyslexic children whereas others are more focused on children's emotional support needs? Do we almost need to flip this on its head and ask what does each child need in order to learn, rather than trying to identify children by exception who need specific packages put together, so that concept of child-centred learning? Just to come back to the patterns of social deprivation that are evident in the categories that are used, generally, you are more likely to get to be identified as ASN if you live in an area of deprivation. If you look at figure 3 in the briefing that we did, we find that the only two categories that occur more frequently in advantaged areas are being identified as a more able pupil and having dyslexia, so those are categories associated with advantage rather than disadvantage. In fact, we find that you are far more likely to get to be identified as having dyslexia if you are in an advantaged area. Social emotional and behavioural difficulties, which is anormously stigmatised category, is imposed by professionals on children. That is really concentrated amongst children in deprived areas, and in advantaged areas it occurs very, very rarely. I do think that we should be very suspicious when we find this pattern of social advantage or disadvantage associated with categories. Of course, being identified as dyslexia carries advantages with it. You can get more time in exams. You can get possibly lower grades to get into university and then get additional time in your exams in university as well. It is not surprising that middle-class parents may seek out this label and pay for private assessment, but we should not be having these social class patterns wherever we observe this pattern. We should be suspicious about what is underpinning it. I would say that just going for the child-centred approach is all right up to a point, but it could conceal what is happening under the surface. Clearly, there are two interlinked themes here. First of all, there is identification of children who need additional support, and then there is actual support that you put in place for those children who have been identified. In terms of the disparity between local authorities, do you have any comments on what is involved in identifying support needs, presumably the number of educational psychologists, actual facilities, assessment centres? I do not know what is required and what role does that play in the disparity between local authorities and identification? I do not want to talk too much. I have a reply to that. Others may wish to raise their hand and volunteer to contribute. Please feel free to give us a name. In Scotland, we have a declining number of educational psychologists, and we also have learning support profession that is ageing. We have a reduction in classroom assistance as well, but one of the problems is that it can be very difficult for parents to get a proper assessment. Some people may be very effective at arguing for an expert assessment done by a psychologist, but many parents just get an assessment by the class teacher. There are social inequalities in the type of assessment that you get as well. I think that what you are saying is absolutely correct, and I know a number of people who are struggling to get an assessment. The assessment within school is the part that is causing the difficulty, and quite often, particularly with kids who are on the autistic spectrum, they can hold it together and they get home, and all the behaviours are seen at home. None of the behaviours are seen in school. Some people are actually being prevented from going down the route of assessment because school does not see the behaviour. You are also asking people who do not have expertise in the area of the particular additional needs to make assessments about something that they really do not know anything about, which also puts a barrier in place in terms of getting a proper assessment? I am asking a situation like that, but if the child is holding it together at school and then letting it go when they go home and I have heard about this before, would you then report that to the school? Would the school then be aware of that, and would you not then take that into consideration? You would, yes. You would report it to school, but very often, in a great majority of cases, your parenting is the problem. There are no problems in schools, so the problem must be at home. We have just been through a situation recently where I have requested additional assessments from my youngest foster son. He is from a different local authority, so his place in local authority has a jurisdiction over his education, and there was resistance from both his local authority and the local authority where he is placed now. From both educational psychologists they say that they do not want to do those assessments, but I sought help from Kindred. I needed another professional in the room before they would listen, and then they have taken forward those assessments. It is really necessary for him to get the best out of his education. Because he is already diagnosed with one thing, it does not mean that there are no other things going on alongside that he needs specialist help with. Even as a confident parent, I was up against it with two different local authorities and I really needed Kindred at my back. That is probably important for people across the board, especially if you are not confident. I want to say that we should acknowledge the amount or the significant levels of responses that have been to our request for evidence. It is shocking, and I am sure that the committee wants to do more than this simply because of the scale of the challenges that so many families are presenting. I think that particularly the evidence from families about the challenges that they have had to face in this regard and the consequence for the young people. I wonder whether we have heard about disparity between local authorities. Given that part of Government policy will be to devolve responsibility down to individual schools, is there also disparity? It seems from the evidence that suggests that you are at the mercy of the individual school and individual staffing within schools. This is not just a question of one local authority against another, it can be at school. I do not know if you have any evidence of that. I have just recently transitioned my wee boy from a mainstream to a department of additional support within a mainstream, both in the same local authority. The attention to detail and the care that he gets in terms of his education is like night and day. I have experienced two mainstream schools in which it was very clear that they did not want to sable children within the school. The number of children with additional needs who left, I would have thought that some level further up would have raised the flag somewhere to say why is this happening. Now this other school, which has a fantastic reputation, the care for the children holistically, their education is paramount, and they do whatever it is that they need to do for each child within that setting. They are also included within the whole school. Other children are learning about difference. These kids are learning to get along and often they go satellite to mainstream classes and they have inclusion right. The mainstream schools that I have experienced where there was no department of additional support, inclusion meant exclusion for many kids, mine included. That is within the same authority. Do you think that there is evidence then that you talk about battling and being confident in fighting and so on, that there are families who simply do not get to the point to exercise their rights and to push their rights. That is going to have a detrimental impact on their child, and so they withdraw when they move the child, in which case we are not really seen even the whole picture of the scale of the challenge. I know parents of children where I live. Quite rightly, I looked after children who are presumed to have additional support needs, and I think that is right and proper. There are other children in our community who have similar needs to mine, who would not be flagged up to that sort of level and would not get the attention and the support and assessment that they need. Those parents are the ones who struggle. Us, as foster carers, we also get additional training so that we know what is out there, and that information is not readily available just to ordinary parents, so I think that there is a bit of disparity there. On the assessment, it is when a child is at the 30-month stage when the health visitor should pick up. The difficulty is that children or families slip through that, so a child is not seen by the health visitor. The health visitor would then make recommendations for a psychologist visit or a speech and language therapist. At that point, if it slipped through, then the child should go to nursery, and it is the nursery staff that would pick up, and it is early intervention at that stage. It is where you would seek for psychologist interception, and this is where we have issues. We do not have the same psychologist now for nursery staff to seek help for speech and language. All those resources at that stage, when we know that the earlier intervention with a child's development is going to help when they get to primary school, if it is lost at that stage, it is very difficult and very challenging to get back what you have lost. Is it flagged up if the health visitor is not seen at that stage? I am not 100 per cent on where, but what I have experienced is that if a parent has been given an appointment at the 30-month visit, if the parent fails to show up on a second occasion, it is not chased, so they are then left and they do not have the health visitors at the moment to chase that up, so it is then left. The parents who are likely to be missing those appointments may well be the parents of children who are most in need for their appointments? Yes, absolutely. If they do not attend any doctors or anybody else, it is then lost until they get to nursery, and that is if they go to nursery. It is then presented at school when they must go to school, so you have got years of lost intervention. I think that in relation to what Salvi was just saying there, that the health visiting service, again, is a screening service rather than a specialist service, so that is one stage in identifying a potential additional support need, but then it leads into, as we have discussed, the other significant resources involved in identifying that. I think that one of the very critical things that I would like to come back to and repeat is that, in relation to the identification and the assessment of need, Salvi mentioned it yesterday, and one of the things that came out very clearly from the discussion yesterday is that parents that are driving this are not the local authorities, as they should be in relation to their obligations with the act in 2004, so that is a particular concern. Parents seem to be working harder than they should be in order to get access to assessment. Thank you, Colin. I am looking at the sheer scale of this. Since 2010, there has been a 153 per cent increase in the number of children with additional support needs that have been identified. I am looking at the wide range of the different issues that they have, English's additional language, dyslexia, speech disorders, artistic spectrum disorder—all those things. Are we asking too much of our teachers? Can teachers—I realise that there are support agencies and so on—but the teachers are the ones that are actually in the classrooms, are we asking too much of our teachers to be able to cover that range of issues? I will let Sam Rean in before Colin, given that she is a teacher. Just to say that I think that teachers have been covering those issues, trying their hardest to cover those issues for years. I am a secondary school teacher, and I think that the issues are lack of training, lack of resources, and again, that is down to obviously budget cuts. Something that Sylvia said about early intervention, if it is not picked up from nursery or primary, then we will try our hardest and pick it up in secondary school as well, but again, another issue is for services like education psychologists, school nurse. I remember back in the day, 10 years ago, you had a school nurse in the school, you had a policeman in the school. I do not think that that is going to come back, obviously, because of budget cuts, but the problem is now that we see an education psychologist at our school, the pastoral care team, SMT, see an education psychologist once a month for two hours if we are lucky. That is not good enough. If we are going to identify young people with needs and you are right, it is not just autism or dyslexia. What about children who have gone through bereavement or mental health? As you can see from the report, mental health has doubled, and we just do not have enough resources and training to deal with us, but we are trying, because that is what teachers want to do. I will pick up on a few points that have been raised so far. I completely agree that early intervention is key. For me, early engagement with families is important, because what is really important here is partnerships and communication from the early stages between local authorities and between parents. I also think—and speaking in terms of Glasgow specifically, which is all I can do, obviously—that we have to have confidence that within our classrooms and our playrooms, we have a rigorous system of staged intervention in place, which allows staff to meet the needs of a wide range of children with a wide range of additional supports. I agree that it is challenging in terms of resources, in terms of being able to train all staff at all levels, to baseline levels that you would want. However, as an authority, we are trying to actively address that through creative links with third-partner organisations and with other professional partners. I think that that continues to be a challenge in terms of resources, but for me, in terms of the issue with psychologists, yes, there are fewer psychologists as a whole. However, what we have moved towards is a much more area-based model of consultation, so that psychologists are able to go in and support whole staff teams to better equip staff in classrooms and playrooms to deal with some of the particular challenging issues that are coming through at the moment. I think that it is absolutely about listening to parents and engaging as early as possible to help to resolve some of the angst that parents undoubtedly have at the key transition points, particularly entry into school and exit between the stages, between primary and secondary, and then the big one of moving on into post-school destinations. It is about actively listening and continuing to engage. I am going to bring Sally in on a bit, but Sheila looks desperate to come in at this point. I think that there is an opportunity to make some connections between different areas of education. We now have more than 20 per cent of children getting on for 25 per cent of our young people identified as having additional support needs, and the Scottish Government wants to narrow the attainment gap of the bottom 20 per cent. Those are the children that we are talking about here. It is very important that the school attainment money, the school improvement money, is channelled into helping this group of children. We need to recognise that schools in disadvantaged areas have a concentration of children with a whole range of difficulties. The attainment monies need to be targeted at these schools rather than spread widely. In terms of what comes to Inquire, we provide information and advice, mainly to parents, but the points that have been raised this morning are things that come to our service. In terms of the scale of the challenge, what we quite often do is to find an advocacy, to signpost parents to advocacy service, but that has already been mentioned. There are advocacy services across Scotland that we can always refer parents on to, because it is that level of support that is quite often needed for parents and carers in terms of taking on the school or the authority just because it can be quite overwhelming. What we definitely hear about is the impact of practitioners having less time. When you have less time and your time, there is more pressure on it, it quite often leads to communication breakdown. That is both for staff in schools and for staff supporting children and families. There are a number of dispute resolution mechanisms within the additional support for learning framework, but it takes energy and capacity and just a particular set of abilities to be able to access those dispute resolution mechanisms. I want to go back to the point about identifying additional support needs. Colin Lennon's question highlighted a whole number of additional support needs that have been identified and that we expect teachers to deal with. I had a meeting recently with a constituent who knew I was a member of the committee and knew that we were looking at this kind of work, and she is a psychologist. It was a really fascinating meeting because she talked to me through the development of reflexes. When you have a child who is pre-birth after birth up to 36 months, the development of certain reflexes—whether that is visual or audio—and the behaviours of those do not develop properly and what happens in the classroom. Sometimes those things are picked up and you can help children just by—sometimes it is something to do with their hearing and their vision and it can help. I was just to put a bit of context because it was quite a long meeting and an in-depth one. She gave me this piece from the Times Educational Supplement in 1999, which said that there was a questionnaire that could allow teachers to screen children really at a younger age to determine what kind of support and help that they need. It was called Neurological Dysfunction Screening or whatever, and the report showed that it resulted in teachers being able to help with exercise and activities at an early age, so it was just to get a bit of feedback from the people in the room as we were having this chat about if a questionnaire amongst all of pupils at early ages, if that is something that can be done. If there is more, we can do it very early age to determine some of those reflexes that maybe have not properly developed. I am not an expert in it, but I have a lot of paperwork and it was just to get a bit of feedback. Sorry for the long question, convener. No, no, no. That is fine. You did need to give a wee background to that. I will let Sharlane and Sylwianne. I think that the difficulty with that is that all of these neurological issues are very complex. You are asking someone who has no knowledge to potentially have a child misdiagnosed or not diagnosed by simply from what is seen in that one wee window. My experience of teachers' pupil support assistance is that they are all very committed, but they do not all have the knowledge and experience needed. They do not have the time to look, my wee boy has a tick disorder. When I was explaining to his full-time one-to-one, if you see him doing funny things, I did not even notice. It is about the people who are working with the kids who need to have the time to notice those things. You cannot expect a child just to sit for an hour and behave and do the things that they would do. It needs to be something that would be a progressive assessment, I think. Okay, thank you so much. I want to say a comment on it. It is not just teachers that work in schools and it is a lot of staff within there. I have worked for over 34 years within an ESL sector and that is exactly what my training was on. We worked with pre-birth. There is a curriculum for pre-birth up to five, so we would, I would be trained in the holistic view. This was a long time ago, so it is the holistic view. We looked at auditory detection, so I would have put all of our staff, all class staff, as teacher, speech language therapists. I had to develop all those skills, but the training was there. We were given the training, so we had an understanding. We knew what to look for. From all that time ago, that training is not there. It is not there. It was a direct training from my psychologists, from my speech line, to give us an understanding and a knowledge of what we are looking for, who we are dealing with and how to go to the next step with that pupil. That is just gone. We have this cascading training from someone coming in saying, I went in a course and this is what we do, or recently I was in a school and I asked a member of staff who was working specifically with a child with Aspergers what training you had in Aspergers, or I was told to watch the Big Bang Theory. That is the level of training that we have got now in schools. I have got loads of examples that I could give of what is happening in its staffing and the training. Okay, sorry, thank you, Sylvia. You were keen to come in on us. I just wanted to say that there are a range of developmental checklists, some of which are extremely useful in terms of child development. Equally, there would be a range of different professional views if you spoke to different professionals about what would be the best one to use. Just to base that on one particular piece of evidence, it is slightly skewed. What I wanted to say is that there are also issues here in terms of initial teacher training and the training that is offered at colleges to support staff as well in terms of upskilling them before they go into the profession. It is not necessarily always down to local authority training when staff are in place. There is a stage before that that needs to be addressed in the preparation for going into working with children and young people. Okay, sure. I would just want to have a little word of caution here. When parents are very anxious, there are often people who will say, this is the magic bullet, this is going to cure your child's problems. A lot of these products are commercial and people have to pay money to get access. Brain Gym is an example of a product that does not really have a very sound scientific basis but has been taken up and used quite a lot in schools. We should be a little bit cautious about some of these things. Research suggests that good pedagogical practices are what is needed in most cases. It may be a lot more one-to-one work, but focus on literacy, numeracy, social development and so on. Those are the things that are important for all children. Two related questions on identification and mainstreaming. I am still trying to figure where the patterns are and the inconsistencies between local authorities. It seems clear that relative level deprivation is one. Professor Riddle mentioned North Lanarkshire, North Lanarkshire was about 6 per cent, Aberdeenshire at 35 per cent. Weston-Bartonshire, which has a not too dissimilar level of deprivation to North Lanarkshire, has an identification level more similar to Aberdeenshire, which is above 30 per cent. If part of the inconsistencies is coming from the choices that local authorities have had to make with resourcing, some local authorities have decided to protect the relevant staff here from cuts and had to make cuts elsewhere. If it has been an issue of budget choices as well as patterns like social economic status. Related to that, a lot of the concerns that have come up around the presumption of mainstreaming are almost always caveated with a support for the policy and principle. I am wondering if the core of the issue around mainstreaming is an issue of resources. Is it that mainstream schools would be able to provide an adequate level of support for young people with additional support needs if they had not had the last six years of resource pressure, or is there a broader issue with that policy? That inclusion is the best path for children. Children grow up into a world where they are going to be living with everybody else. Putting children into separate schools may not be a very good option. It may be a very good option for some children, but we should be very cautious about saying that we need to expand that sector. In fact, when we look at the proportion of the child population in special schools, it really has not changed in Scotland at all. We have always been a very inclusive educational system. Only about 1 per cent of children are in special settings, special schools or special units. That really has not changed. There has been no change since 2005 looking at the data. In rural areas, it has never been practical in Scotland to send children to some sort of special schools. The special schools have always been concentrated in the urban areas. We really need to focus on making sure that resources are available in mainstream schools to support children. Okay, thank you. I want to bring in Liz at this point. Just on this theme, having had a long period with constituents writing about this mainstreaming issue, I entirely agree with you that inclusion is desirable, particularly from a social angle. That is very true, but notwithstanding that, in my experience, there are a lot of local authorities who absolutely refuse to send or to make provision for the child to be sent to a special school when that is what is the best educational needs of that child. That disturbs me a lot. I am very interested as to whether, just to follow on what Ross Greer was asking, we need to have a bigger debate about mainstreaming and whether, if in the 1 per cent or fewer, where special schools are undoubtedly the best educational outcome for the child, whether that is best in special schools themselves, or whether we should do more to develop the kind of unit that Sharon was talking about when she spoke. I am very interested in the evidence about that, because I could name several cases where I have had constituents who, quite clearly, have had great angst and difficulty in getting the right educational package for their child. Too often it is because the local authority has refused to provide that package on the basis of not assessing these needs properly. Can I just ask for an advice on this? The law currently says that there is a presumption of mainstreaming, but there are three important caveats there. A child should be placed in mainstream unless it is against the wishes of the parents, against the interests of the child or other children in the class or would involve unreasonable public expenditure. If a local authority refuses to countenance a special school placement, if that is in the interests of the child, they are actually breaking the law. That comes back to what Sharon was saying, that they are not always aware of that and know how to react. That is why they should contact the local MSP. They do. They indeed do. Presumption of mainstream is absolutely what we want for children and young people, because it does expose them to that social situation that they will not necessarily get in standalone schools. However, in terms of Glasgow, we, because of the size of the authority, have a large number of standalone and co-located provisions. We have 37 standalone and co-located specialist provisions and two preschool assessment units. What we are moving towards is having a much more flexible throughput from the specialist provisions into mainstream, because we have a relatively large number of highly skilled expert staff working in our standalone provisions, who we should be using in a much more flexible way to upskill and to work in conjunction with staff in mainstream provisions. We are looking at how you best meet the educational needs of the child at a particular time in their life, and if at a particular time they need something more intensive, then they should get that with the view to be moving them into a mainstream provision when they are ready to do that with the right resourcing to support that. I always pause before I ask a question, because people look at me as a head of school and say, well, if you do not know who else does, the fundamental question for me relates to what is mainstreaming. For me, mainstream education is access to the aspirations of the curriculum and the development of the four capacities that we aspire to. That is what the mainstream is. It is not the building, it is not stepping through the gate, it is the experience leading to the aspiration of the curriculum. We know that that cannot simply be met in one particular type of resource or location. For me, there should be a focus on the question of what mainstreaming is, because so often we hear about young people who are mainstreamed, who get access to their local school. However, the experience within that school is one morning a week, two mornings a week, a couple of hours. That is not mainstream. Mainstreaming is access to the full curriculum and an appropriate resource that develops the capacities that we aspire to. That is what mainstreaming is, in my opinion. I just wanted to mention the recent enable campaign that was included in the main. Just in terms of the fact that more than 100 children and young people with learning disabilities surveyed as part of that. In terms of positive mainstreaming experience, they raised some issues about particular challenges. One was about understanding of their peer group in terms of their needs. We need to do more within our schools in terms of making sure that all children and young people are aware of the range of needs, about appropriate responses and reactions, and that the school community and the parent body raise awareness with them about children's needs. Most of our inquiries are in relation to children and young people with autism, and we quite often hear from parents that they just feel that within the mainstream school there is just a lack of understanding about their child's needs and their participation in the school is not particularly supported. I think that we would just call for and suggest that there is more done about just understanding needs and behaviours and appropriate responses and reactions. Thank you very much. In terms of the presumption of mainstream as a parent, I do not agree with the presumption of mainstream. I agree with the presumption of my child being educated in the best place that is going to meet the needs, and mainstream may or may not be that. In terms of inclusion, we may have a history whereby we have tried to include many children who are doing the quality control in terms of that inclusion and what that actually feels like for the children, because for a lot of children that inclusion actually makes them feel really excluded. They are with peers who are not peers. My son, who was in primary six, played with the primary twos, which then left the primary six. He is making fun of him for playing with the primary twos. He is now in a class where there are mixed ages, mixed abilities, he gets on great, he has a peer group. In terms of looking at mainstream as opposed to additional support units, schools, alternative provisions, it really needs to be based on the needs of a child. For some children, mainstream is never going to work ever, regardless of the will and the training. The other issue is not only in terms of training. You can train people as much as you like, but if they do not care, they do not care, and you cannot train somebody to care. It is about culture. I have experienced cultures with an education, one where it is very inclusive and it is fantastic and very holistic, and one where we just want you to go on. As a parent, you cannot change that culture. It is extremely difficult to have to go up against that. On the presumption of mainstream, I personally support inclusion, but it has to be done appropriately. The setting and staffing have to be right with the appropriate training. However, I have found that, when I am going into mainstream schools now, where presumption of mainstreaming is, where children who would have been identified go into an ESL school, the support staff that it is left to because the teacher cannot work within an environment where she has got 20 pupils and two or three are showing their displaying challenging behaviour. It is the support staff that end up taking the children out, so they are being taught in either individual wee rooms or they are roaming in the corridors with our staff. Interestingly, we have got the stats from health and safety, where the ESL violence in the sector has dropped dramatically in that sector, but has risen dramatically in the mainstream. We have moved children into the mainstream sector without any of those staff being trained appropriately to have the knowledge that they have been done. If they have attitudes that they are at it, they do not understand that they are autistic, but they are at it because they do not understand. There is a violence increase and staff do not know how to amend. We have got absence because staff are stressed with work-related issues, or they are absent because of their injuries in school. We are just not getting it right, so it brings Gyrffek into question. What about all the other pupils that are there in the class who have the right to be taught in an environment that they are having to deal with a child who is displaying inappropriate or violent behaviour? Was that not the point that Colin Crawford was talking about earlier on about using the trained teachers in the special schools to train us? For me, there are four main issues here. There is undoubtedly the issue of resources. There is a big issue in shifting thinking of some staff in acceptance of youngsters who have got a range of additional support needs coming into mainstream provisions. There is a training issue and there is the issue of communication. What is core in all of this is having a clear and shared understanding of roles and responsibilities and who does what, good communication about on-going developments and strong and effective leadership at school and nursery level. Meeting needs is absolutely dependent on having the best possible curriculum planning and learning and teaching being delivered to those children and young people. We seem to be really unsure about where we are with this, even the use of language about mainstreaming and not mainstreaming. We know that it is a quarter of the population of the school pupils that are in this position. It says a lot about where we are right now. I want to go back to a point earlier on about looking after children and being automatically assumed to have the ASN needs. We heard earlier about the children who missed their assessment times and whether there are other triggers in there about not taking up nursery places that should also give an automatic referral into an assumption of ASN needs. That is a fair point. Do you have any comment to make on that? Early intervention stuff, about the 30-month assessment, is quite often missed. I know just because of the community that I live in and the number of people that I know who have children with disabilities, that is a really difficult one because you are expected to do a tick box of what your child can and cannot do. For many of us, they can do nothing, so they just do not go to the appointment because it is easier. I understand that that should be a flag, but it is not necessarily about people not wanting to work with the system, it is about they cannot face it. Maybe if that 30-month assessment was changed in some way, then parents would engage more and they would go for help rather than seeing it as all. They are just going to tell me what my wean cannot do. Will you suggest that it should be a flag? It should be flagged, absolutely. It should be flagged, absolutely. But maybe if the assessment is done in a different way, the parents would engage, it could still be flagged, but they would not avoid. Kenny, you wanted to come in. It was just a comment in relation to the potential vulnerability of looked after children. This again, it was discussed yesterday at the meeting involving the commissioner, and it is this anomaly that we have just now, whereby the cost to redress, if you are unhappy with the services that you receive, would involve a tribunal. Local authorities are not going to take themselves to tribunals, so it is important to flag that up. There is a particular vulnerability there and one that we should be concerned about. I think that resources are actually very important here, and it would be very easy in a climate where education resources are being cut for learning support to be quietly whittled away and putting children in special schools as being seen as a solution to the problem. We have had a 10 per cent reduction in classroom assistance, for example. This is very, very poor in my view. These are data from Audit Scotland. We ought to be very careful to recognise the importance of resources, but also to avoid moral panics that things are vastly worse in schools than they ever were. The surveys that are commissioned by the Scottish Government periodically on behaviour in schools do not show that things are massively worse in schools. We should be really careful about saying that there was a golden age when things were perfect in Scottish schools and suddenly they got a lot worse, but that does not mean that we should avoid really looking hard at the problems that occur when you cut resources. Daniel, you wanted to come in here later on? I was really wanting to just to forgive me that it requires backing up a little bit, but I think that it does touch on some of the points that have been made about a point that Sammarine made about teachers doing their best. I think that what Colin was saying about the level of training and support that is available, but I also mentioned in a subsequent answer about teacher training. Forgive me if this is asking you to generalise a lot, but what training is available to teachers—I realise that it will vary from local authority—and what is the gap between what is available and what is needed? If I could just ask Colin to expand on that point about teacher training, where do we need to get teachers to so that they have that broad level of understanding? The other key point that has come out from the discussion is—I touched on what Professor Riddle just said—about the level of specialist resources in schools. I mean, what does that look like in comparison with the past and where it needs to be? Is that about having a dedicated councillor in every school? Is it about having dedicated guidance teachers who can then spot requirements and draw in specialist resources from that school? Is there any sort of high-level view of what that could and should look like? So there's training and then what specific resources are required in schools? In terms of teacher training, I think that there's a fairly superficial coverage at college level in terms of additional support needs. There's no real drill down into individual conditions. However, that can be partially addressed through a probationer programme—we've got quite extensive probationer programme in Glasgow specifically—which offers all probationer staff fairly intensive drill down into individual conditions such as a statistic spectrum disorder and some time in some of our specialist placements, but not enough time. I think that it's about building that pre-knowledge before staff come into the profession that would help there. Professor Riddle, you wanted to come and ask. It's not reasonable to expect that in a one-year PGDE that people are going to get a really deep grounding in every single type of special need. That's never ever going to happen, but what has actually got worse in Scotland is postgraduate training for teachers who have a number of years' practice under their belts and then need to come back for really detailed grounding. It may be in a very specific condition or in learning support generally. People used to get a year's sabbatical to go to one of the schools of education to get properly trained as learning support teachers. That doesn't happen anymore, so people are kind of learning on the job. There is a problem with people who've been through very rigorous training reaching the end of their working lives, and we haven't got a new way for professionals coming through. That's a real cause for concern. Is there something between that basic training and the very specialised training? Is there what about CPD for people who just need a step up in specific knowledge because of specific circumstances that they may be facing as a teacher? That is very patchy in Scotland. There are only three—there are only for children with visual and hearing impairment—do you legally or by regulation have to have an appropriate qualification? For everybody else, nothing is specified at all. Very often, people haven't done enough short courses and they certainly haven't done enough long courses to have the type of training that would really fit them to be good principal teachers of learning support. In that, we are completely different from other European countries. In terms of Glasgow City Council, there are service days that are dedicated to this. There are CPD opportunities, but I think that the issue has been, in the last five years, the amount of workload that teachers are going through because of the stress of the new curriculum, because of the national qualifications. Unfortunately, I feel that ASN and other things like equalities in education are somebody else's problem, because I need to work on the qualifications and develop the curriculum. It is changing the mindset. It is down to resources and training. It is really to back that up, but there is no specific training for teachers in a sector unless it is for visual impairment. I have worked in the ASL sector as a sport for learning instructor. Over those years, a new teacher—either a new start or somebody who was on supply—had no knowledge of any of the children that would come in to teach in my class. I would teach the teacher on how to work with the children because they would not be able to sign, because we would use sign language. We would use a PEX communication system where children have no language, so we use a picture exchange system. I would teach the teacher how to speak to the child, because there is no training, so the teacher would learn in that environment. On that question, would there not be some role for the local authority to ensure that there was such training available for teachers? I accept that you are talking about budget pressures and time pressures and stuff like that, but this is a serious issue, as Claire already talked about. It is 24 per cent of children that are affected by this, so should there not be some role for the local authorities to ensure that there is adequate training available for teachers to take? I asked that question once of Maureen MacKinnon, the director, about the previous one. I had asked that question about a teacher coming in, and I was told that teachers have transferable skills and they can teach in any circumstance, so they would pick that up. I think that it is about creative thinking as well. We work quite closely with, for example, the Autism Resource Centre in Glasgow, and they deliver training for us across the city through CPD. There are also opportunities for staff to do online training, which is not ideal, given the time pressures that staff are under with workload. I completely agree with you, but it is about thinking creatively. One of the things that we are trying to do at the moment is to look at a baseline level of training for all our support for learning workers. In Glasgow, there is an excess of 1,400 support for learning workers, and what we want to do is offer them training, but that has to be over a rolling programme, because how do you work with so many staff? We want to try and upskill them into some of the very practical tasks of working with some of our most challenging children, because that is the issue. I think that challenges staff more than anything is what do you actually do in a classroom, in a playroom, to manage a young person? You can have a plethora of courses that are about awareness raising, but what staff need is what do I actually do when X happens. That is what we are trying to work creatively around, but that is extremely challenging in a large authority, given the resource implications. To exemplify resource implications, in Glasgow, if you were to go back several years, we had a central team of staff quality improvement officer staff who delivered regular training, and we had a staff team at that point of an excess of 36 staff. There are now six of those staff, so there are huge challenges in actually delivering at school and playroom level. I would just like to echo what the submarine had said in relation to the broader context of education and the pressures currently in relation to CPD in training for teachers. Of course, I represented, if yesterday they mentioned the 35 hours that teachers are obligated to take care of their own personal professional development. However, we have the curriculum for excellence now, which in one of the submissions to the committee, Lorna Walker in XHMIE, described as desperately complicated. I believe entirely in the aspirations of the curriculum. I am not somebody who would knock it, I believe in it. However, it is challenging. We have the SQA now working to align the national award system, so we could have standard grades and overlaps with intermediates. Again, I think that the aspiration of that is absolutely appropriate and commendable. GTC are working hard to ensure that we have a very professional workforce and we have now the introduction of professional update. Any one of those initiatives on their own would be enormous and soak up huge amounts of time and resource, so doing them all and them all arriving at us one time as a school head, finding the time to prioritise and make decisions about which is the most appropriate and most important obligation that I have is incredibly difficult. I believe that all of those initiatives are laudable, but, in the wider context, we really need just to put our foot in the ball to use our football analogy and just to slow things down a little bit, because there are great pressures there in making decisions about what is our most important priority at this time. I think that there are two different lots of things going on. First of all, the idea that you need an advocacy system in order to enforce your rights is about the individual, it is about systems not resisting people, it is about understanding, but I do not think, in terms of what submissions we have, that is not really reflective of what is coming much more strongly out of those. I do think that you need an advocacy, you ought not to get into a battle and people's rights should be enforced, but I think that we also need to look at some of the patterns that are in the submission. My own view is very much in favour of a presumption favour of mainstreaming for all children. I think that all children benefit from learning together. My concern would be that, and it comes out in some of the material here, that the child with the additional support needs is then seen as the problem. You reinforce, well, what are they doing here, this is a real problem, and I think that there is something a bit straightforward equalities issue around that, but also anecdotally I have been advised and perhaps I do not know if that is true in Glasgow, but that basically a child has to fail on mainstream before they get moved on to a specialist unit. Now, if a family knows that the child is not going to survive there, why do we put them through that process? And also this question of exclusion within mainstream, so yes, theoretically in mainstream, but you are sitting in a class on your own out in a corridor, enable has done this work, the survey by NASUWT highlights these questions as well. I wonder whether can we really get away from the pattern that is coming out of the evidence in a context where you have got more young people identifying with extra additional support needs, you have got fewer staff and that is a big question. Additional support teachers have been used to do cover because of the shortage of teachers. At what point are we going to confront what seems to me to come out of the evidence? This is actually about resources. Yes, it is about culture and all the rest of it, I am not undermining that. However, if you have got more identified, you need fewer staff and schools managing the challenging process around the curriculum or whatever. At what point how do we really focus back on the rights of these young people? One point that I should mention in the background, I do not know whether people know that, but you talked to me looked after children being presumed as having additional support needs. Is that true for kinship care children, because one of the campaigns around kinship care has been is not just about being paid a wee bit extra money to support the child, but actually having access to educational psychologists and supporting the way that I looked after childhood? I would just like to add to that, yes, I would say that kinship kids who are in kinship care absolutely will have additional support needs. They will have experienced the same trauma, the same abuse, the same neglect that the kids who are with foster carers or in residential care have also experienced. Therefore, they need the same kind of inputs in terms to try and help them to heal. I point out that Professor Riddle made an interest in Samrin's opinion on this as well, attracting more people into ASN teaching. Would some consistency in whether or not ASN teaching is a promoted post help with that, because it seems that it very rarely is. There is not any level of consistency around it. I have a particular view on that, but I do have a view that there is a need for better training for people who have the title, Principal Teacher of Learning Support. It is about training and raising awareness and getting the resources in. I will pick up on the point about the potential of pupils having to fail in mainstream before they were moved on. In a city that is the size of Glasgow, that is all that I can talk about. We have 65,000 children across the city, almost 10,500 in primary schools who have additional support needs of one form or another, and 9,500 in secondary schools who have identified additional support needs of some scope. The vast majority of those children, their needs are being met well within a mainstream setting. Do we get it right for every child? No. Those will be the ones that come to your attention. What is important is that, when it goes wrong, how quickly we move in to move those children on. If we can do that quickly and work in partnership with schools and with parents to minimise the trauma of that transition, that is what we need to get right. On the whole, for the majority of young people, it does work well. We need to hold on to that fact as well. That may or may not be the case. It is not just that there is a danger. We ask for evidence while the people who come are the people who would come because there has been failures. I think that it is a lot stronger than that. The message coming across the board from submissions is a major problem around the amount of time a child is supported, the quality of the support that they get, the ability to access the curriculum in a real way, rather than theoretically being there and the whole sense of there being a constant battle. That inevitably has to come. If there are not the resources to do it, you and those who are the most well-meaning in the world, the unions that come across from the parents, there is a pattern of problems being identified rather than a simple individual breakdown for individual families. I will come in on that point. There was a closure of a school in my constituency, and some of the children who were now moving into a mainstream school, albeit in a unit within the school, had been in one previously and had been taken out because they were not coping with it, and yet they were then being put back in the same situation. For us and for the parents and for those who were supporting them, that did not look like it was a decision driven by the needs of the child. It looked like a decision that was driven by budgetary requirements or whatever. I suspect that it might not have been the case, but it is certainly how it appeared. That is something that local authorities have to be very aware of. While we are talking about budgets and there is no doubt about it, budgets are tight and so on, the responsibility for most of this comes to local authorities and local authorities have got priorities to make the same as everybody else has when it comes to making decisions about how you spend your money. Just to follow on from some of those questions, can I just come back to something that Sylvia mentioned earlier? You talked about a lack of training of the real professionals in this worry about cascading, and I think that you described it. How serious is that problem? There is an expectation that you will pass it on to somebody who does have the knowledge, rather than having that really appropriate training to ensure that everybody's problem—is that a really serious problem? Yes, I think that it is. When you are trained by a speech and language therapist or a physical therapist or an educational psychologist—and it depends whether—and it is having that knowledge of whether you know whether the child that is presented in front of you—do you need a clinical psychologist or is that an educational psychologist—me having that understanding that I know where to look for? Who would have that within a school? Who would have that knowledge? So it is someone who comes in who has a bit of knowledge because someone else has told them that that is what is happening now. I have got this. This is how we work. This is what I do. You said before that that was not the case. No, it was direct training from a speech and language therapist or an educational psychologist, a clinical psychologist, a physiotherapist, who gave you the understanding of why that child was behaving. You analysed the behaviour or, if it was a cerebral palsy pupil or a motor impairment, they talked about what is the brain doing, why does that child need to walk in that way or why does that child—I have that understanding. So for me to then try and tell someone else who then would tell someone else, that is what is happening now. That is the stage that we are at now. One final question. There has obviously been a significant change as you describe it. Is that because the definition has changed and therefore we are identifying so many more children who have these needs and therefore we are spreading our resources much more thinly across that? Are there problems in the nature of teacher training? What is the reason for the change that you have just described? Purly budget cuts. We had the training there because in the school that I worked with you knew the psychologist personally. If you were in first name terms, you knew who you were. If you had any issues, you spoke to them. Now you can go into a school and you can ask who you spoke to, have you raised that with the psychologist or who is that. They would not know who that would be and who they would go to. Training has just been diluted and from what we had a good system, it is now just being diluted, eaten away at till we do not have any training now and you are learning from each other. If someone has got bad practice, they are passing on bad practice. Earlier on, Professor Riddle talked about a golden age. I am a wee bit concerned that what we are talking about here is a golden age. The way people get trained now is different from when they were trained a while ago because there are all sorts of technological ways that they can do it. Things move on. The cascading model, I think, is used in not just education, but in lots of other organisations. I do not think that the cascading model in itself is a bad practice. If you are not getting the resources at the beginning so that the person is trained properly, you cascade it down, that is an issue, but surely the cascading model is a bad practice. The training is about staff being given the time to go for training. As a support staff member, teachers have CPD, so they have their 35 hours over and above that they are legally have to train and have to take that on board. Our hours are from 9 to 3, so we are front-face workers, so we work from there when the children come in until they leave, so we have no time outwith to get trained. When we are in class, we do not get out, we do not have non-class contact time, so it is very rare that we would get out of class to go and be given training. We are there, we are front-faced, we are fire-boiling all the time, so we are not given that opportunity. Then the quality of the training that is coming down, it is the fact that you do not have the time to go and get it. That is a different thing. Thank you very much for that, Sheila. In places, cascade learning happens. You ask somebody how to do something if you do not know how to do it yourself, but you have to have somebody who has a proper qualification in the first place to do the cascading. At the moment, we do not have any proper post-qualification training to be a learning support teacher, for example. It is all very ad hoc and sometimes it is done well, sometimes it is not done well. I think that it would be a good idea for us to have a proper post-graduate qualification in learning support. If that implies having that as a promoted post, that might be an incentive to do that, but we have not got that training there and we did used to have it in the past. I made the point to a previous meeting that the classroom in my humble view is very different today as it was 20 years ago. Clearly today we are discussing the fact that there has been a 50 per cent increase in pupils identified as having additional support needs since 2010, so that is one big change. There are more languages spoken in the average classroom in Scotland than there were perhaps 20 years ago and so on and so forth. Things have changed. Given the references to the need for additional classroom assistants, educational psychologists and so on, I am trying to work out how the committee can give recommendations on the smartest interventions that the ministers can make to help to address the pressure that we are talking about today. Is anyone able to prioritise what the intervention should be from government to help to address some of the pressures that we are discussing? I think that what is really important is front-line staff, well-trained pupil support assistants who know the children that they are dealing with and the numbers of those. I think that they have dropped and it is really important to get those pupils back into place and working with the individual pupils on the front line. That will make a difference for everybody because if they are helping a pupil and stopping them from disrupting a lesson, they can pre-empt behaviours and see what is going to happen and give them time out of class. That would definitely help. The school that my two sons go to have—I do not like the language because I do not like what it is called—is a learning and behaviour department. Most of the children in that department are not physical needs. They are looked after children, children on the autistic spectrum disorder, and they have other difficulties like that. How that works in that school and it works really well—this is definitely a model that works well—is that all of those children have a base. They are in mainstream education and in all the mainstream classes with support, but if they are overwhelmed, anxious or need some time out, they have that base to go back to it and it is staffed all the time. It is staffed through break time and lunch time, and it covers all of those children. They have a safety net within the school and they can access learning. Also, when they are in the base, they are learning when they are there as well. There is always something there that they can do to continue their education. It is not just to go and sit and pass a time doing a jigsaw if they are learning when they are there, so that is definitely something that works. It probably does not cost as much as giving pupil support assistants to many different children because they can look after them all in that base. There are three practical points that have arisen from the discussion. One is the issue of training that we have returned to. Second, I would say that some of the school attainment, the school improvement money that is currently available is channeled into areas of deprivation to provide much better levels of support that are really needed in those areas. The third thing is really just to make sure that schools and local authorities are aware of their legal responsibilities, that this is not something that you choose to do, it is something that you legally apply to do. That is providing proper support for children with ASN in mainstream schools, where the vast majority are, and of course in special schools as well. In terms of something practical, we have focused a lot on training this morning, but what training? Are we needing to think about a training needs analysis of all staff that would give us that baseline of exactly what training staff need to make them feel more confident in the day-to-day job that they are doing? I am just a parent, as you know, but something that I think would be really useful, and it would be useful for staff members within school, it would be useful for the kids, it would be useful for the parents, is some way of quality assuring the inclusion. Who is checking that it is working? How are you going to check that out? Are you checking it out with the kids and the parents and the schools all together? Or is it deemed to be working because there is no exclusions? Do you know who is deciding that it is working? It might well look on paper that it is great and there is never breakdowns happening at home. Alternatively, it could be really rough in school and really good at home, but it is just who is actually looking at how well it is working? Who is assessing that and who is making the decision about is it working or is it not? I think that needs to be looked at. We cannot just assume because the bodies are in the class that it is working. That is a good point. It has been noted and you are never just a parent. Just to mention communication, I said earlier that the impact of pressure on a system quite often is that people, their communication breaks down. I would just go back. There were recommendations made in communication matters that the CREED team carried out back in 2012, with very good, in my view, recommendations just about going back to basics in terms of time and clarity and consideration and respect for listening. To some respect, we need to go back to that focus on the human aspect and the communication aspect and make sure that, because there are pressures and challenges, that does not contribute to a worse experience for children and young people and their families. It was just to go back on something that Professor Riddell mentioned twice now about the attainment fund money that is coming to schools. What we have heard today is that there are variants across the country and some local authorities seem to be better at taking their responsibility on, but others seem to not be identifying people. The Coordinated Support Plans is one of those areas in which we can see quite a variance. It would be really interesting—I think that you have got the cabinet secretary next week—to get some clarification about that fund, because what we do not want to see is that money being used to plug a gap that local authorities should be fulfilling at the moment. It would be good to get a bit more clarity about what the targets are for that fund. The funding is distributed on a multiple deprivation index. To that extent, schools in those areas will be getting that money, but we would need some clarity on what the purpose of that is. It is a separate thing to the issues that have already been discussed regarding budgets and pressures on local authorities at the moment. Okay, thanks for that. Silvia, do you want to come on? It was just really on to back up there that— Yes, it is staffing on moving forward. It is staffing, and it is appropriate training, as Colinhead said. It is communication for all staff, not just the hierarchy within us, a sector, because it does not come down to the support staff. If everybody, including parents, staff are all communicating, it is a consistent approach. Everybody is consistent, everybody knows what everybody else is doing and why, and it is the inconsistency that breaks down. We are now, I would suggest, nearing the end of our discussion. Can I ask if anyone has any points that consider our priorities for the committee that they have not had the chance to make yet? It was something practical. It was discussed briefly yesterday. We understand that there is going to be some new guidance issued or looked at in relation to the evidence that we gather, but it links to what was commented on. I think that the Dorian review suggested that there has to be a quality assurance mechanism to our report and recording. I think that Bill Coley, as an educational consultant and his submission to the committee, mentioned that we should be seeking the views of pupils and parents in relation to the quality of the experience. That is absolutely critical. If we do not ask the right questions, we do not get the answers. We need to make some appropriate changes. In that case, can I, before I move to private session, consider the evidence that I would like to thank all of our guests today? We also have the cabinet secretary appearing before us next week, has just been mentioned, and we will certainly be raising some of those issues that I have come up with today with Mr Swinney. I thank you again, and we will now move into private session.