Chamber and committees

It is 49.5 per cent.

We had the benefit of hearing from some young people who had been through the experience of getting support and so on. They came here and we had the opportunity to speak to them and get their views, which was really valuable. The ones I spoke to were very scathing about what support they received at school. Subsequent to that, as they transitioned on, they were fairly scathing about the jobcentres as well. They felt that the jobcentres did not know what to do with them.

I also had the opportunity in the past week to visit a couple of schools in my constituency. I have one high school that has 49.5 per cent additional support needs and I have a primary school with 54 per cent additional support needs. That scale is huge. How do we address that?

Do the resources exist to be able to provide that level of support for the sort of percentages I talked about? I know that additional support needs are a whole rainbow of different needs. Some of them are very light touch and some of them are very intensive but, nevertheless, all of them need resources. At those percentages, how do we allocate the resources? Where do they come from? As I say, it is not just about money; it is about having people available to be able to give that support.

Why are we not gathering that data? It seems so—

How can that change?

I notice that there is not much mention of jobcentres, although everybody with disabilities ends up at a jobcentre at one time or another, because they have to. What we heard was that they did not really understand them.

Well, it just seems so basic that we should have information at our fingertips to enable us to better support people and better target that support.

The final area that I want to look at is data and information gaps, and I have two questions that I am interested in getting a response to. Do we have an understanding of the level of unmet need for support in Scotland? Do we have sufficient understanding of disabled people’s experiences of the labour market? Do we have any data on that? Are there other specific data gaps that it would be useful to get information on, in order to better target the work? After all, in the end, this is all about targeting.

We recently had the opportunity of meeting young people with experience of the system, particularly employability services, and it was interesting to get their feedback. I have to say that the feedback from the ones to whom I spoke was pretty negative, and it focused on their experiences in school and at jobcentres. Do employability services in Scotland meet the needs of people with learning disabilities and neurodivergent people?

Perhaps you could start, Alan.

Although my example referred to young people, I did not mean to restrict my question just to them. It just so happened that that was the experience that we were able to delve into.