Over 2 in 5 Scottish children in school have ASN

[Dontletthebedbugsbite2]

This seems like a huge amount of children with additional support needs, the numbers have doubled since 2014. Why is this? This includes mental health problems, autism spectrum disorder and also things like dyslexia.

I feel sorry for all of these children who need additional support and are unable to access it at school, I also feel sorry for teachers struggling to manage the needs of ever growing class sizes & children without adequate support. It seems like a ticking time bomb.

I don't necessarily think the numbers have increased hugely tbh, it's just there is increased awareness and diagnosis.

My own DC went through pretty much the whole of school with no support at all but were diagnosed at the end of school or as adults with ASD/dyspraxia/ADD (Executive function disorder) and anxiety. They were clever and well behaved so raising any issues were pretty much dismissed/ignored. Their difficulties became more apparent when they needed to go out into the world as adults. I'm sure a lot of children with diagnosis are not getting support either.

Looking back at my own childhood, I'm pretty sure I would also have met the criteria for anxiety/asd but no-one really dealt with anything back then. You just learned to get on with it as you had no other choice.

But yes, teachers are on a hiding to nothing and as usual the children are the ones that lose out.

Am I the only one who thinks we’re handing out diagnoses for normal personality traits in a lot of these circumstances?

I recently read an article in the economist which made a fairly convincing argument that many ADHD cases are just traits that many people have to a varying degree.

The problem being that the environment in schools and workplaces only suit other types of personality so we think there’s a problem, when in reality it just isn’t the right environment for many of us.

Obviously not in all cases but I can’t help feeling there’s a trend to get children labelled these days when often it isn’t needed and can actually do more harm than good.

It's incredibly difficult to get a diagnosis and takes years. In fact it's taken 5 years for my DD to even get a referral, in spite of really struggling academically and socially. It'll probably be 3-4 years before she gets a diagnosis. So no they're not handing them out like sweeties

I wish they were handing them out like sweeties, January sees my dd 4 years since referral still no appointment. The saving grace is you don't need a diagnosis for the additional support at school.

A lot of things were always there just either not recognised (especially in girls) or not deemed severe enough. Whereas now its more recognised that girls show autism, add etc differently then what was known about the conditions.

I'm dyslexic it's not the barrier people think if you are taught the mechanisms that work for you. I was even told I'm not "dyslexic enough" to warrant extra support. Thankfully I was taught those different learning mechanisms by others.

The biggest issue to it all is the time it takes to get seen and how many children become disillusioned with school and give up or are labelled the "naughty kid" rather then teaching them simple things which can work and stop a cycle.

ASN also covers English as a 2nd language (so went up
when Ukrainians came over after Russian invasion), looked after children, young carers, bereaved children as well.

STV news said the figures had doubled since 2014 so I was quoting them. I find it insane that almost half of all children in scottish schools have ASN/additional learning needs. Is this actually just more people being recognised as needing support? Surely this can't go on with children and teachers struggling in mainstream schools. I know it's difficult to get additional support workers for children due to the cost & it's also not feasible if almost half of the class need this. I don't know what the answer is, more specical needs provision?

Correct, that is the answer, but certain councils only focus on saving money.

If you can afford it you’ll get your child into a private school that can help them with their needs, because state schools are indeed floundering. I read somewhere recently that private schools have double the ASN that state has, and that’s partly as the wealthy can afford to get private diagnoses, but it’s also as if it’s a choice of living off beans and sending a child to a private school or home educating, many parents of ASN choose the former.

State schools will be much harder hit following the addition of VAT.

It's more to do with increased awareness more than anything. Thank goodness. Just need the resources to catch up.

Hmm, I’m not so sure. Speak to any teacher and there is usually at least one child per class who is totally unable to sit and learn. This wasn’t the case when we were younger - these children would attend a specialist school. Does anyone remember teaching assistants? They didn’t exist 30 years ago. It’s inclusion that’s the issue here, inclusion that’s destroying our education system.

I'd say it's a bit broader - special schools need to diversify to recognise that we are much better at identifying what the problems are now and there is a huge range of different needs.

It's a good thing the nhs has gotten better at identifying children's needs, and terrible that no similar step has happened in state education.

Nobody wants to turn back the clock, but the increase in diagnosis hasn't been met with any significant or sufficient state sector diversification of school options - quite the reverse, we've shut special schools, are tunnel vision on the co-ed large comprehensive model and now we're additionally taxing education spending parents who've been able to afford to go private for their children...whilst having no ideas to address the ASN state sector crisis.

I may look on this very simply but I think that funding should be increased to create small support schools to get the kids who can’t learn in normal schools elsewhere.

Somewhere that they can be better supported and to take the pressure off other kids and teachers who struggle to learn/teach in disrupted classrooms.

Maybe that’s something the VAT Payments from private schools should be funding.

Yes, six in a class, teacher and PSA. Works brilliantly.

Edinburgh are disbanding their current ASL central team and streamlining. Lots of children were declined special school places when mainstream is not right for them but schools have had the pupil support funding cut! It's a complete disaster and staff feel the pressure. Sickness levels are doubled while staff spend a lot of time in tears despairing that they are failing children or not being listened to!

Yet Edinburgh have a school where West Lothian pay for their children to go to meaning Edinburgh save money while children are being failed being in the wrong setting for their needs.

This would clearly make lots of sense and would improve the lives of all children immeasurably, but would mean the SNP admitting they got things wrong so ain’t going to happen. SIGH!!!

If only @Meeplemakeglasgow if only...as it is, I'm not sure Scottish education will see any net benefits from VAT. It needs some out of the box thinking to encourage new ideas as there are none I can see.

One friend in rUK managed to get his primary aged dd into a tiny 'private' primary cheap school run by a retired primary HT who has taken on 5 or 6 discouraged kids and...it's working brilliantly. I don't know why we can't incentivise the many teachers who've dropped out or retired early due to the problems of mainstream schools killing what they love about teaching to try similar.

I’d look at what has changed for children that could cause their needs to increase. Is child poverty impacting their early development? Are they now spending longer in childcare and starting it earlier? Do they have access to adequate medical care? What are their home lives like? What standard of prenatal and post natal cate did they and their mothers receive? What enrichment like exercise and play is available to them?

John Smith institute did a child poverty review recently and putting more money into the hands of poor families has been good, but we're at the stage where further more difficult policy interventions are needed to attack the long term roots and I'm not sure I see a plan for that either.

And can't find that - might've misremembered as this makes same point:

SNP’s special payments ‘failing to fix child poverty’

www.thetimes.com/article/a4874c8f-a746-4bf7-bce6-dfca67ab10cc?shareToken=8df99b8f2cd74407c8ce5a593d45c1c4

It's certainly true that there is a relationship between ASN and deprivation they are interlinked issues for a lot of the ASN cohort.

I'm seeing a difficult clash here between "these classifications are really hard to get" and "almost half of children have them". How are both true? Is it regional differences? Are some parents actually pushing for diagnoses that shouldn't be made?

I'm not sure we need to pathologise everything. Classifying 40% of children as not normal in some way doesn't strike me as terribly helpful and it might be better to go back to focusing on the more extreme outliers - but also recognising that an awful lot of people struggle with what we have traditionally treated as "normal" and perhaps we need to change things to accommodate that.

(E.g. if school is overstimulating for 30% of kids you don't focus on special treatment for those 30%, you try to make it less stimulating for everybody.)

This^
Anything else is a sticking plaster. We need to treat the root cause.
I don't believe it's just down to better diagnosis now, that's only 1 part of it.
If you remove a diagnosis/label (which you don't need in order to get support anyway) WHY do we have so many more children with additional needs? WHY has number of children unable to cope in schools due to anxiety rocketed?

Poverty, poor home environments, medical care etc were no better 50 years ago so what has changed?
I'd like to see some really good research into this and then we'd surely have a better chance of tackling the root cause for our children's futures

Re diagnoses - both can be true - the nhs model we have currently pursues separate diagnoses for commonly co morbid conditions like Autism and ADHD - so many children are sitting on waiting lists two, three or more times, and then after being diagnosed with something, subsequently sitting on mh treatment lists.

Tara Porter - the ex camhs person has written a book 'you don't understand me' and one of her criticisms of camhs is that the diagnosis has become an end in itself.

I do think anxiety and ASD children being overwhelmed with mainstream schooling -both a big cause of school refusals - is made so much worse by having violent and disruptive children in classes. Teachers are not allowed the tools that would actually control this. Allowing permanent exclusion would help so much.

If I knew I would / could be beaten up in my workplace every day I would have anxiety, but we are expecting our children just to suck mainstream schooling up. Being able to make mainstream state schools a calm and safe place for our children to be would solve so many issues, freeing resources for the other children.

When I think of how many of the state school’s resources were poured into my child - 121 therapy, time out cards, access to the snug, coping classes with other children - all just to help them cope with the threat / reality of being assaulted regularly. They went to private school, were not living under any threat, were suddenly happy, and none of the above coping strategies were needed at all. We removed them from the CAMHS waiting list as they were no longer self harming. But the state school were unable to remove the violent bully from the school as permanent exclusions are banned.

The Head at the state school (who we dealt with a lot) seemed very frustrated with the situation, saying that people think his job is teaching when it is nothing to do with teaching anymore, it’s safeguarding, safeguarding, safeguarding. This is one of Edinburghs most saught after state schools.