Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No63
Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No63
Newsletter Themes: additional support needs, discipline, emotional learning and parents’ authority
SUE substack editor, Penny Lewis addresses the anti-Hate Crime Act rally at Holyrood on 01 April
Over the past month there has been a lot of media chat about young people and their mental health. In Scotland’s schools, we appear to have particularly large numbers of pupils who are being classified as in need of some kind of additional support. The growing number of children categorised in this way has implications for both budgets and discipline. This week, teacher Julie Sandilands provides an update on trends in additional support needs (ASNs), following her article in March 2023. Rachael Hobbs has been immersing herself in the latest insightful new book by US writer Abigail Shrier, in which she provides an important critique of social and emotional learning (SEL) in the USA and suggests that parents should trust their own instincts and teach their children about a wide range of human experiences and virtues, including disappointment, self-restraint, pride and sociability. Both articles are critical of the tendency to look at child-development schooling and parenting as therapeutic or even medical issues.
One aspect of this therapeutic approach to education is the promotion of ‘social transitioning’ in Scottish schools. As we go to press, we await publication of the conclusions of the Cass Review, led by paediatrician Dame Hilary Cass. Based on Cass’s interim findings from 2022 (which led to the closure of London’s Tavistock Clinic), we expect the final report to say that trans-identifying children face serious psychological consequences if they are allowed to socially transition, and to argue that changing a child’s name and pronouns is, at best, not a neutral act. To date, the Scottish government has continued to provide Tavistock-like provision at the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow. Could it be impossible that they could argue that they have nothing to learn from this important study? Watch this space.
A crisis in the classroom
Some children need additional support, but when the proportion of these children is approaching forty percent, it’s time to look more carefully at why this is happening. Julie Sandilands is an English and business teacher who worked in several secondary schools in Fife until 2017. She currently works as a private tutor teaching children both in and out of mainstream provision.
Last year, I wrote about the growing number of pupils labelled as having additional support needs (ASNs) and asked the question, ‘What percentage of pupils with an ASN do we need to reach before we really start to pay attention and avoid a crisis in the classroom?’
The latest Scottish statistics show that ‘in 2023, 37% of all pupils (259,036 individuals) had an ASN which is 2.8 percentage points higher than 2022 when 34.2% of pupils had them’. Compared with the relevant figure of 17% in England (which admittedly uses different categories), and considered alongside regular reports of falling standards, rising truancy rates and poor discipline in Scotland’s schools, this latest increase warrants another look at the question.
Clinical diagnosis by a medical professional
Children with a suspected ASN condition are usually referred by their GP for specialist assessment. A diagnosis is reached through a multi-agency approach including input from schools, social services, and child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), as well as parents/carers.
However, it is not clear whether the current assessments carried out by clinical staff are sufficiently complex and thorough to accurately diagnose autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit–hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and related conditions. The quality of the process to monitor the progress, or otherwise, of any treatment protocols, and the internal audit systems to ensure consistency in diagnosis and quality decision making, are not clear to see. Most importantly, it is not clear whether the decision-making framework is free from bias, both internally and externally. There is a real risk that service providers are prioritising expected assessment outcomes over the ‘first do no harm’ and precautionary principles that guide medical decision making.
Financial support
While diagnosis is one issue, there are also financial incentives to seeing your child as requiring professional support. There are several financial support schemes parents/carers can apply for if they believe their child to have a condition; one example is the Child Disability Payment (CDP). Disabilities include emotional and behavioural difficulties. No formal diagnosis is needed for the CDP application; a supporting letter from a professional, for example one from the child’s school, will suffice. Decisions are made on the basis of the form and supporting information, and applicants do not have to attend a face-to-face consultation. If the child is awarded the middle or higher rate of the care component of CDP, parents/carers may also be able to claim Carer’s Allowance.
Key takeaways from recent Scottish government statistics show that in December 2023, it is estimated that 75,935 children and young people were in receipt of CDP (up from 54,375 [+36.7%] in December 2022). Between 26 July 2021 and 31 December 2023, the total value of such payments issued was £514.2 million (up from £132.5 million [+288%] in December 2022).
The most common category of condition was Mental and Behavioural Disorders, (Codes F00-F99), which accounted for 75% of the caseload (56,815) in December 2023 (equivalent to 22% of all pupils registered with an ASN in 2023).
Economic future
There is a risk that some of these young people might automatically transfer to the adult equivalent benefit. Figures for 2024 show that 32% of all claimants of Adult Disability Payments, and 17% of all claimants of Personal Independence Payments, are within the age bracket of 16–34 years. Does the benefit system encourage parents/carers to seek to label their child with one or more disability? Is there the creation of a long-term benefit trap, which over time becomes more difficult to escape, thus creating a swathe of economically inactive young people?
The blame game
Poor behaviour is one of the main barriers to education, whether it be persistent and low level or a full-on disruptive incident that stops the lesson entirely. But rather than being managed through a positive behaviour management system, which encourages personal responsibility and self-discipline, there is a growing trend to see it as a condition – a vulnerability requiring a therapeutic, analytical approach. In some instances this maybe the case, but it should not be the go-to, easiest-to-reach one on the shelf. Sometimes it is what it is and should be managed as such.
Once a child is registered on the school database as having one or multiple ASNs, whether based on a clinical or a non-clinical diagnosis (a non-clinical diagnosis is usually done in schools by the additional support staff and include a range of factors such as communication support needs, young carer, bereavement, substance misuse, family issues, and risk of exclusion), any bad behaviour is all too often blamed on the ‘condition’. This assumption can leave teachers powerless to control disruptive pupils. Sometimes the student will be awarded with a number of concessions, such as the following.
A ‘time out card’, which allows a student to leave a lesson (without asking for permission) to seek refuge in a designated area within the school, for example the special education needs (SEN) department.
Flexible or part-time timetable.
Regular absence and late-coming is often recorded as ‘authorised’.
Exemption from certain school rules.
Safe spaces set aside for morning and lunchtime breaks.
External and internal exam concessions.
One of the questions I feel compelled to ask is whether parents/carers, social services, and schools struggling to manage a child’s behaviour look for diagnostic evidence that partly removes accountability from themselves and the child for any consequences occurring as a direct result of said child’s behaviour? Are schools too eager to identify and add pupils to the SEN register? Are they under pressure from parents/carers to identify their child as having an ASN in order to benefit from extra support in school?
In 2021, addressing the rise in ASN numbers, the Scottish government commented: ‘The number of pupils recorded with ASN has increased markedly since 2010 and there continue to be year on year increases. These increases were likely due in part to continued improvements in recording and the introduction of the additional need types “Child plans” and “Other” in 2011.’
The word ‘likely’ does not inspire confidence that the root causes are actually known, and in order to answer the questions raised here, a rigorous review by the Scottish government, including assessment of the recording and categorising procedure, is well overdue, because if the current trend continues, by 2030 Scotland might find itself in the embarrassing position of having to explain to its people, the rest of the UK, and the world, why nearly 50% of pupils in Scottish schools are labelled as having ASN.
The growing number of students in a classroom who are registered as having an ASN undermines those with genuine special needs, ultimately taking away crucial support for learning, with resources diverted to managing persistent disruptive behaviour. This continued rise is simply unsustainable and risks the need to cut budgets in other areas of the sector, as well as placing ever increasing demands on teachers endeavouring to deliver the curriculum while at the same time ‘getting it right for every child’.
Furthermore, the implications do not always stop at the school gate once a pupil leaves school but reach into further or higher education institutions and the workplace, as expectations of previous levels of support continue.
The remarkable increase of £381.7M (+288%) in the burden of CDP over one year is deeply troubling in an economy with very little growth, as is the percentage of 16- to 34-year-olds currently claiming Adult Disability Payments. While the focus on mental health and all its components is welcome, there is a danger of labelling people struggling to deal with the normal trials and tribulations of life. The time has come to have a realistic, honest conversation on how best to support pupils who bring additional challenges to the classroom, as a post-school positive destination is often determined by the number of qualifications achieved in senior phase. In conclusion, what percentage of pupils with ASNs within the education system do we have to reach before we really start to pay attention and avoid not only a crisis in the classroom but also in the economy?
Book review
Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the kids aren’t growing up (Swift Press: 2024)
Rachael Hobbs, a teaching assistant and mother, reviews Shrier’s second book on the damaging impact of therapy culture on child development.
According to Abigail Shrier ‘A healthy emotional life involves a certain amount of daily repression’. This common-sense idea is considered scandalous in today’s therapeutic culture, which sells us precisely the opposite position.
Shrier writes for the Wall Street Journal, and her first book, Irreversible Damage, was voted Best Book of 2021 by the Times. Her latest book urges us to change course, to ditch the holy grail to the ‘inner self’ for the sake of our children’s mental health. She demonstrates how the expansion of psychotherapy into our everyday lives has set children up for failure, unhealthy introspection, and lack of resilience.
From therapist’s couch to the classroom
Shrier acknowledges that a rich emotional vocabulary helps children better describe their feelings. The crisis, however, is our making a pathology or religion of these experiences and the normal tribulations of life.
We have crossed ethical lines, she argues, in our amateurish projection of therapeutic practice onto schools. ‘Teaching’ pupils about feelings, through ‘social and emotional learning’ (SEL) policy has necessitated a lot of boundary intrusions, let alone dumbing down of academia. It is commonplace for teachers to ask pupils in these lessons to divulge their feelings to the class (or really, the teacher) and create an environment of compelled sharing. The minority of pupils who do have troubled backgrounds have their needs for confidentiality breached, in our rush to bring therapy to the majority of kids who do not need it.
Shrier injects much needed humour into her description of SEL content. She looks at the way in emotions are injected into maths lessons, how emotional self-monitoring surveys are introduced into class, and how topics such as how to make friends make a trauma out of an everyday experience. She warns against the extension of ‘trauma-based education’, originally offered to hard-to-reach kids, to all kids.
Using a mix of research studies and common sense, Shrier argues that interpersonal skills are learned through real-life trial and error. She writes that, ‘We now assume that by discussing a hypothetical disappointment kids can skip the painful experience and arrive straight at maturity and social competence. But there is no real way to learn to overcome anything except by struggling and eventually succeeding.’ (p. 85).
She reminds us that with children, whatever teachers focus on, grows with the child. ‘We are telling them that this deeply imperfect signal, what they are feeling, is always valid… Feelings fool us all the time. Very often, kids should be sceptical that they reflect an accurate picture of the world and even ignore their feelings entirely.’ (p. 43).
Schools should be providing a standard for expectation, and performance, that is, putting your best foot forward. Encouraging pupils to take refuge in the reliable expectations with which the teacher will greet them each day is important. Shrier urges teachers and parents to do kids the honour of ‘assuming they are capable of delivering.’
Smothering parents
Many have forgotten that emotional modelling (or emotional meddling) was formerly the domain of the parent. These days, parents are portrayed as pitiful figures; they are often told that ‘professionals’ know more than they do when it comes to their children.
Shrier believes parents have been reduced to the inert role of best ‘buddy’ to their offspring. Any trace of ‘authoritative’ parenting is rejected because it creates a moral boundary, which to the therapeutic professional is recast as non-validation. Meanwhile, the parenting ‘advice’ industry encourages parents to get overly involved in all aspects of their children’s lives, thus stifling freedom.
Shrier highlights the work of Lenore Skenazy, the American author and pioneer of the ‘Let Grow’ movement. Skenazy campaigns for independent activity among children, which she says promotes short-term joy and long-term habituation to the routine stressors of life. Peter Gray, cofounder and leading US psychologist, contends that the decrease in independent activity by school-aged children and teens over the past four or five decades is a primary cause of the decline in their mental health (p. 222).
Patronising kids through inane therapeutic teaching and the excruciating ‘gentle parenting’ approach has, Shrier argues, been instinctively picked up on by kids themselves, who seem to have less respect for their elders. The attack on parental authority has benefitted commercial third parties, from unscrupulous advisors to the producers of mental health apps. By reaching for therapists, parents themselves are not helping. Shrier says that, ‘The message to any child patient is twofold: your mother thinks there is something wrong with you and your problem is above her pay grade. The presence of an intermediary will automatically alter the relationship with your child.’ (p. 42).
Removal of moral language
Shrier explores children’s sense of self and agency. She argues that the rush to therapists and diagnoses and/or medication is entangling children in a process of clinical diagnoses and detachment, when their problems are often simple developmental phases, or sadness, or challenges. She reminds us that not all bouts of depression or anxiety are disorders; most are simply short-term adaptive responses. According to Shrier, emotional pain may do us good, helping us react faster, remember more clearly, or even think more deeply about our lives.
The contemporary approach to bad behaviour is almost always therapeutic, meaning it is non-judgemental. Shrier reacts against the current fashion for parents to teach their children to understand their ‘frustrations’ rather than teach them to control their impulses. This approach retards the growth of self-restraint, pride and sociability.
Today, a moral language is replaced with therapeutic language. Whenever parents become ‘educated in the therapeutic method’, they invariably conclude that they have a sensitive child. Parents then inadvertently create sensitive children. ‘The environment they curate is so frictionless it offers the child no preparation for the normal chaos of the world.’ (p. 179).
Shrier believes we are pathologising behaviour. ‘Every shy child now will be deemed to have social anxiety or generalised anxiety disorder, every weird kid is on the spectrum, all clumsy kids have dyspraxia, even irritation over clothes labels means a child has “sensory processing issues”, and it goes on.’
‘Treatment-prevalence paradox’
The book explores the irony of the increase in mental health problems in an era of supreme therapeutic support. We might have expected the opposite correlation. The problem is that mental health therapists are now treating the healthy, and psychological disorders once the domain of medical doctors (psychiatrists) have been handed over to an unregulated industry.
Looking to the USA, over the past 50–60 years, membership of the American Psychological Association has virtually doubled every decade, and each generation has required more therapy than the one before. Nearly 40% of our current rising generation has received treatment from a mental health professional, compared with 26% of Gen Xers. Furthermore, 42% of American children have a mental health disorder diagnosis. One in six children aged 2–8 years has a diagnosed mental behavioural or developmental disorder. More than 10% of US kids have an ADHD diagnosis. Nearly 10% now have a diagnosed anxiety disorder (p. 17).
As Shrier says, ‘the mental health establishment has successfully sold a generation on the idea that vast numbers of them are sick. Less than half of Gen Zers believe they have good mental health’. This feeds the collective neurosis.
Escaping the emotional abyss
Shrier identifies foreseeable catastrophes as other contributors to mental illness in youngsters in recent years: unforgiveable lockdowns in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, expansive and almost palliative use of smartphones, and the cut-throat world of social media. All have eroded children’s confidence and connection to the real world, which provides healthy interaction, adventure and experience.
Our fixation with feelings is creating helplessness and solidifying children’s fears. Even with climate change anxiety, Shrier asks, is it really rational? Why are we encouraging children to embrace their despair via our nodding along of a histrionic belief in imminent Armageddon, rather than countering with the best medicine and grounding there is: getting a grip on ourselves?
The answer to this reveals a wider crisis over our ideals. ‘What we’re seeing isn’t a mental illness crisis. Its deeply connected to the values and world view we’ve given our kids, the ways they’ve raised them, the influences around them.’
What should we do? Give them more independence at an earlier age, even in minor-sounding things such as running errands or walking home from school, within which what Shrier calls the ‘window of independent learning’. This instils confidence when children are young and diminishes their fear of the world by the time they are teens.
How to respond to worries? Shrier points out that when children express anxiety, they are seeking reassurance. ‘Kids toss a lot of worries at parents just to see which bounce back.’ She advises, ‘When your teen acts out keep your head. Remain in charge. Don’t immediately hand off your kid to a mental health expert. You decide whether she is in crisis or not.’ Shrier tells us that most of the time, the remedy is the opposite of what we are doing. She recommends teaching resilience, hard work, courage, and ultimately, that emotions are often the most unreliable things to hold on to.
Citing advice from renowned psychologist Leif Kennair on how to really help children with ‘self-regulation’, we should tell them: ‘Worry less, ruminate less, verbalise everything you feel less, self-monitor less and be mindful of all you do, less’ (p. 72). Its good advice – we would do well to walk away from therapeutic culture.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
Fears SNP's 'hate reporting hubs' could lead to students and lecturers having reputations 'ruined' - Scottish Daily Express David Walker, Fears SNP’s ‘hate reporting hubs’ could lead to students and lecturers having reputations ‘ruined’. The Scottish Education Union (SUE) outlined fears that students and university staff could be reported to police over non-crime hate incidents, and this could affect their job prospects. 29/03/2024
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/scottish-education-sharp-declines-in-numbers-of-maths-and-physics-teachers-raise-huge-concerns-for-future-scotsman-comment-4580049 Scotsman comment, Scottish education: Sharp declines in numbers of maths and physics teachers raise huge concerns for future. Despite the SNP’s promise to boost the number of staff in classrooms, Scotland now has fewer teachers than in 2007. 05/04/2024
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/frances-schools-are-succumbing-to-the-islamist-threat/ Gavin Mortimer, France’s schools are succumbing to the Islamist threat. 05/04/2024
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/nhs-taskforce-to-probe-surge-in-demand-for-adhd-diagnoses-5617895 Epoch Times, NHS Taskforce to Probe Surge in Demand for ADHD Diagnoses.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24233632.additional-support-needs/?ref=ebln&nid=1220&block=article_block_a&u=3113c1b3a77b3e25e409aaa02c22166f&date=060424 What are additional support needs and who has them? 06/04/2024
https://archive.is/2024.04.06-204150/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/06/children-socially-transition-face-grave-psychological-risks/ Camilla Turner, Children allowed to ‘socially transition’ face grave psychological risks, review concludes. Warning comes as concern grows over schools allowing pupils to change gender without parents’ knowledge. 06/04/2024
Thanks for reading the SUE Newsletter.
Please visit our Substack
Please join the union and get in touch with our organisers.
Email us at info@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk
Contact SUEs Parents and Supporters Group at PSG@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk
Follow SUE on X (FKA Twitter)
Please pass this newsletter on to your friends, family and workmates.