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National Autistic Society Scotland submission of 12 October 2021

PE1870/E - Ensure teachers of autistic pupils are appropriately qualified

About us

The National Autistic Society Scotland is a leading charity for autistic people in Scotland and their families. There are around 56,000 autistic people in Scotland, both children and adults, plus their more than 174,000 family members and carers. We provide local specialist help, information and care across Scotland to autistic children, adults and families. We offer a wide range of personalised quality support at home and in the community, both in groups and one-to-one. Our branches in Scotland offer families and autistic people help and mutual support, and our employment team support autistic people in work and their employers.

Petition PE1870

The National Autistic Society Scotland is broadly supportive of any measures employed by the Scottish Government to ensure that teachers of autistic pupils have an appropriate level of knowledge and understanding of autism. Our charity has long been concerned that autistic children are not having their right to an education fulfilled and are missing a significant and concerning amount of school as a result.

These concerns led us to work together with Children in Scotland and Scottish Autism in recent years, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of autistic pupils and their families. We sought to understand the amount of time some autistic pupils were missing from school and the reasons why this had happened; whether alternative arrangements for their education had been put in place; what support had been offered to return to school; and importantly, what the impact on the children, young people and their families had been.

The resulting Not Included, Not Engaged, Not Involved report, launched in September 2018, laid bare the experiences of autistic children who had missed school, collected through a survey of 1,417 parents.

Key findings from our report included:

• 13% said their children had been formally excluded from school in the previous two years.
• 34% told us their child had been unlawfully excluded in the previous two years.
• 28% told us their child had been placed on a part-time timetable in the previous two years.
• 71% said that their child had missed school for reasons other than common childhood illness in the previous two years.
• 85% did not receive support to catch up on work they had missed, regardless of the type of absence.
• 72% felt that staff having a better understanding of how their child’s autism affects them, including their communication needs, would have made a difference to their child.

On the back of these findings, and our report’s nine recommendations, the Scottish Government established the Autism in Schools Short-Life Working Group. As party of this group, our charity, along with numerous other stakeholders, worked in partnership with the Scottish Government, the General Teaching Council for Scotland, Education Scotland, and the Scottish Council of Deans of Education to improve autism awareness and training within schools and educational settings.

In December 2020, a number of agreed changes were announced by the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, John Swinney, ensuring that all new teachers will receive a common baseline of content on autism during their initial teacher education (ITE) programmes. This is an important step forward that will go some way to tackling some of the key issues highlighted by the Not Included, Not Engaged, Not Involved campaign.

Conclusion

The National Autistic Society Scotland acknowledges the work undertaken by the Scottish Government and partners since the publication of the Not Included, Not Engaged, Not Involved report in improving the baseline knowledge and understanding of new teachers, and ensuring that all teachers have access to the resources and information related to autism and autistic learners that they may require. We believe that this is a hugely important step forward that will see long-term improvements across Scotland’s schools and educational settings. In order for these improvements to be monitored, however, it will be crucial for the Scottish Government to track the role-out of the new training, as well as recording important statistics, such as the number of autistic children in education, rates of exclusions, and more. We remain broadly supportive of any additional measures the Scottish Government may take in the future to improve the autism awareness, knowledge and understanding of teachers.