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

As anyone with even a passing interest in Scottish education will know, the number of school pupils with additional support needs (ASN) has increased massively in recent years.

In 2015, a total of 22.5 percent of all pupils were recorded as requiring some form of additional support as part of their education; by 2025, that figure had risen to 43 percent. If you look only at secondaries, 48.8 percent of pupils now have ASN, and that’s just a national average, so there will be plenty of schools across the country where more than half of all young people fall into this category.

Importantly, more than 90 percent of pupils requiring extra help also spend 100 percent of their time in mainstream classes.

This means that schools are now trying to accommodate a very wide range of increasingly complex additional needs, and the hard reality is that in many cases they are finding it impossible to do so.

Make no mistake about it: there are thousands of children up and down the country who are being failed because of a crippling lack of capacity across the education system, a problem that has been created in no small part by politicians’ failure to properly understand, plan for, or fund the well-intentioned policy of presumed mainstream inclusion.

Ask the parents and carers of pupils with ASN about their experiences and you will, without........

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