Chamber and committees

Thank you, convener. I will be as brief as possible. I will return to the point about diagnosis that Kaukab Stewart brought up. We need to do a lot more to look into the discrepancies—the racial and cultural disparity, as well as the gender disparity in particular, given that girls really struggle to get autism diagnoses. I am interested in the witnesses’ perspectives on diagnoses across the board and the impact of lockdown on that. Despite the fact that the overall number of diagnosed additional needs has gone up, I am working on the presumption that, in some cases, it would have been hard, if not impossible, to get a diagnosis during lockdown. Does that mean that a backlog has built up between last summer and now? Are there further delays in the system for getting a diagnosis, or is that part of the system still working relatively well and the problem is assigning the relevant support once the diagnosis has been confirmed?

I have a second question, before I come to Laurie Black. Maybe I will roll them into one, given the time constraints—I hope that you do not mind, Laurie.

A number of points have been made about support staff. The job title varies—school assistants, classroom assistants, pupil support assistants—but the role is, in essence, the same: providing support to children who have been diagnosed with additional needs. Should there be any requirement for qualifications for any member of staff who provides that kind of one-to-one support? Standard practice in most schools is to assign general classroom assistants to that role. I do not wish to denigrate those people but, in most cases, they have no specific qualifications in additional support needs. Should support staff who are assigned to help young people with additional needs be required to have some kind of qualification in ASN?

Thank you. That is all from me, convener.

It seems daft that a group of young people who were, by definition, some of the hardest to reach and engage with had—in an entirely unplanned way—finally been engaged with. It would be more than frustrating for us to lose that progress.

My main line of questioning, which is on children’s rights, is directed primarily at Bruce Adamson, but I would definitely be interested to hear the thoughts of Stephen McGhee and Linda O’Neill as well. Recently, there were issues with the Scottish Qualifications Authority’s relative lack of familiarity with equality impact assessments, children and young people’s rights and wellbeing impact assessments, et cetera. That largely predated the pandemic. During the pandemic, thanks to interventions from your office and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the SQA has made a lot of progress.

I am interested in your reflections on local authorities as we went into the pandemic, right at the start, as things had to change rapidly. Did they demonstrate that they had a pre-existing level of familiarity with equality impact assessment and children and young people’s rights impact assessment processes, or was it the opposite? Was there consistency across the country? Did some local authorities demonstrate that that was already embedded in their practice?

Stephen or Linda, do you have any thoughts on the normalisation of impact assessment and the culture of children’s rights in local authorities?

Sally Cavers, is the experience of the families that you work with similar?

If Ramon Hutchingson is looking to come in, I will be very happy to hear his thoughts.

Before Stephen McGhee or Linda O’Neill comes in, if they wish to, I note that I take on board Michael Marra’s point that looking back is useful but looking forward is more important. Some local authorities have made significant improvements, partly because of the additional scrutiny of their practices that the pandemic provided. From what you have seen so far, have local authorities taken the approach of permanently embedding those processes into what they do or are we in danger of it being a one-off experience—that Covid required an additional level of impact assessment and we will go back to the way in which we did things before? Have we normalised that approach or does the culture in local authorities mean that it is all seen as pandemic related and so not required to continue in normal work?

I have another line of questioning, but I would first like to stick with the issue of attendance.

Bruce, at the start, you mentioned the group of young people who had been disengaged from school before the pandemic but who found remote learning quite beneficial, as it provided them with a route back in. We know that, overwhelmingly, the pandemic has thrown up barriers rather than taking them down, but in that case, it has done the opposite.

Have you had any discussions with young people in that situation recently—in other words, since August, when schools moved back to the default of in-person learning? Has the progress that was made with that specific cohort been undone by what has happened as we have returned to normality, or has some of that progress been maintained?

In your conclusion, you mention the potential need to move away from the SQA’s relatively demanding quality assurance processes if we were to move towards a system that had less external assessment. There is a strong cultural attachment to external assessment and verification. Will you expand on why it is not necessarily essential? If we compare that cultural attachment in Scotland to the position in other systems, does it ultimately come back to trust in teachers being perceived differently elsewhere and to trust in the system or are there other cultural factors that we would need to work on in Scotland if we were to move away from our current system of external assessment and verification?