Mar 23, 2025, Herald Scotland: Parents of autistic pupils turn on Scot Gov classroom inclusion policy
The families of children with autism say mainstream education is damaging them. They talk to our Writer at Large
YOU lose your friends, your marriage. I lost my job and home,” says Joanne Lamond.
Her friend Natalie Blue replies: “I haven’t been to a shop in 2025. I’ve been out once this entire year.”
Rebecca Smith – who asked for a pseudonym to be used to preserve her family’s privacy – adds: “My mental health was in the toilet. I had to reach out for help. I was so low. I don’t want to go into it all, as my kids are around, but I was the lowest you can get.”
The three women are painting a picture of what it’s like to be the parent of a child with additional support needs. They run the organisation Empower:ED Scotland, which campaigns for ASN families.
ASN families say they’re in the middle of a crisis. The number of children with conditions like autism is soaring, while school resources dwindle. Disabled people are in the cross hairs of the Labour government’s austerity programme. Discrimination is rising, and ASN children are increasingly blamed for violence in society and schools. . . .
Lamond’s daughter has autism. Like most ASN children, her daughter is meant to attend mainstream school. It’s what is known as “inclusion” – the policy of educating ASN pupils alongside other children.
But like many ASN parents, Lamond says mainstream education failed her daughter. “Her education broke down. She was out of school for years. The school environment just didn’t meet her needs.”
Blue’s six-year-old son also has autism. Due to the “trauma” he experiences by attending mainstream school he can appear disruptive to other pupils and teachers. He’s been out of school for more than a year.
Smith’s child is autistic as well. The nursery he attended told her “they simply couldn’t handle him anymore and we had to find other provision”. School has become nightmarish. He’s “pre-verbal”, which means “he can’t formulate his own sentences”. . . .
Attending mainstream primary school has “traumatised” him, Smith says.
The system which caters for ASN children in schools “is a shambles”. The Scottish Government knows exactly how bad matters are, Lamond says, as it staged an inquiry into additional support learning. “They got all this evidence but nothing happened.”
ASN children are “pushed into the mainstream”, Lamond adds. But children like her daughter just “aren’t able to cope in a mainstream setting. They suffer sensory overload. It can be hell on Earth for them”.
Outburst
ASN children can be completely overwhelmed by the sounds, smells, and whirl of activity in mainstream schools. That can trigger behavioural outbursts. The education of the rest of the pupils can suffer as a consequence.
Lamond, and the other parents favour the creation of “intermediate schools”. These would provide a halfway house between special schools for children with profound needs and mainstream schools. But when it comes to intermediate schools, “there’s nothing like that in Scotland”, Lamond adds.
Patrick Kieran is also part of the campaign. His son is five and autistic. He wants his child to attend an intermediate school. “The risk is if he goes to mainstream it will be beyond the scope of his ability and it’ll come crashing down and fall to pieces. Then you have a situation where the child is traumatised and it puts them off education for life.”
He fears that if his son was sent to a special school for children with “profound disabilities and challenging behaviour” it might cause him to “regress. So we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place”.
Kieran adds: “The Scottish Government has this presumption that all children should be educated within mainstream school. The idea of inclusivity is all well and good, but the reality is there are some children who need support over and above what mainstream provides.
“While all these platitudes are nice –that everybody is equal – the world isn’t like that. We’re supposed to be giving children an education which ties in with their needs and abilities. We should push them to reach their potential, but we shouldn’t do that in a way that’s detrimental to their health and wellbeing.
“Shoving kids into mainstream school because it’s cheaper is easy.” . . .
As the situation stands, parents find “the pathway through the education system horrendous … It’s hard enough being the parent of an autistic child as your life changes in ways you can’t imagine. Then on top of that you have to fight the system. It’s draining”.
An astonishing 40.5% of pupils – that’s 284,448 children – have additional support needs in Scotland. The number has doubled since 2014. Meanwhile, the number of ASN teachers has fallen. In 2013, each ASN teacher supported 40 pupils. By 2023, the ratio was one to 89.
Blue describes the system as “shambolic”. It took from January to September last year to assemble a multidisciplinary meeting about her son’s education and inability to attend school. An occupational therapist and educational psychologist were assigned but still haven’t met with her son. In addition, there is a nurse, social workers, and council officers.
“But he’s still out of school. It’s a box-ticking exercise.” She doesn’t blame the individual teachers or other professionals. “They’re lovely people, it’s a systemic problem.” . . .
Smith is a teacher – which is why she wants to remain anonymous – so knows the system from the inside. Every parent of an ASN child “has to put on boxing gloves”, she says. “You don’t stop fighting.”. . .
Kieran says that it’s not a question of ASN children “failing mainstream school, rather mainstream school has failed them”. . . .
Evidently, as numbers of ASN children rise, resources must rise accordingly. “I see no evidence of provision growing,” he says.
“If anything it’s shrinking.”
Cuts
STATE support for disabled people is to be cut by £5 billion. The Labour government is under attack from backbenchers, unions and disability charities who say this will push disabled people deeper into poverty. Parents of ASN children fear the financial impact.
UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting has been criticised for claiming there is an “overdiagnosis” of mental health conditions.
Lamond said such comments and the cuts are “all part of the stigmatising of disabled people, the language used is full of stereotyping, othering, demonising and marginalisation”.
Parents, she says, “live in fear of the future for their children”.
Cutting support makes it appear as if “the society you live in doesn’t truly value your existence” and that it’s “okay for disabled people to live in poverty”.
Families of ASN children “live much more basic lives, a more meagre life as befits our position in society which is undoubtedly as ever at the bottom”. Social attitudes are “dehumanising and Dickensian”. . .
The Labour government “has belittled the disabled community”. The disabled are seen as “easy targets” due to claims that they are “faking it to live in luxury – and that’s not true”.
Her child doesn’t even want to “disclose her diagnosis for fear of judgement”.
Lamond questions why there wasn’t “fairer taxation of the wealthy” rather than cuts. Due to NHS waiting lists, ASN children “are being left without the early intervention that’s proven to improve long-term outcomes”.
She adds: “As a result, too many young people with ASN face a future of increased dependency, not because of their conditions, but due to systemic failures in education, healthcare, and employment support that’s set them up for economic failure.
“Instead of penalising the most vulnerable, the government must focus on creating inclusive policies that provide genuine opportunities for all.”
Lamond pointed to research by ADHD UK which rebuts claims that mental health issues are overdiagnosed. It found that ADHD was actually underdiagnosed in Britain.
Kieran said that as “parents of ASN children are already poor”, the government had chosen to “make the poor poorer”. Parents of children with ASN incur greater costs and also need to spend more time at home caring for children which impacts their earning power.
Blue said claims of overdiagnosis “ignore the reality that many people struggle to even access a diagnosis due to long waiting lists”. She added that “removing essential support will likely lead to increased crises, higher demand on the NHS and ultimately greater costs to the government in the long run. Instead of investing in proper support systems these cuts seems to punish those who need help the most.
“It feels like the concerns from disabled people are being ignored entirely and their fate is in the hands of people who don’t value their views or needs.”
DISCRIMINATION is rampant, the parents believe. The very notion of “inclusion” needs questioned, Lamond feels. “Exclusion is a society-wide issue,” she says. “That can’t be fixed by throwing all the kids in together and hoping that in 20 years there will be an inclusive society.”
Her first experience of exclusion didn’t come from the school system but other parents. To many ASN parents, inclusion is a “joke” as the sense of exclusion is socially pervasive.
In terms of education, the policy of inclusion will only work, Lamond believes, when schools are properly equipped to provide the level of support ASN children need.
So, is she saying the policy of inclusion is good in theory but a disaster in practice? “Yes.” Blue replies: “I agree. It’s not working.” Blue would be happy for her child to be educated in mainstream school if he was adequately supported. “But he’s not supported.”
Smith, who has taught in special schools, says there’s a big difference between the educational needs of ASN children and children in special schools who are “wheelchair-bound or deaf and blind”.
ASN children, she adds, “aren’t special enough for special schools, and not mainstream enough for mainstream”. . . .
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