How Scotland’s special needs crisis grew out of control

On a quiet residential street in Glasgow lies a special-needs school, one of 20 in the city.

Like the rest of the UK, Scotland has seen an explosion in the number of children with special needs in recent years. Some 43pc of children across Scotland qualified for special educational and disability support in 2025, up from just 4.8pc in 2005.

Nowhere encapsulates this trend more than Glasgow, where more than half (56.3pc) of students were entitled to special educational needs and disabilities support last year.

“I think you could probably build at least two more additional support needs schools in Glasgow and they’d be filled,” says Sharon*, a teacher who works at the side-street school, the name of which has been withheld for privacy reasons.

Explanations for the rapid rise in the proportion of children with special needs range from a genuine increase in pupils in need of extra help to parents pushing for their children to get individual attention in school.

The definition of special educational needs is also significantly broader in Scotland, with children who have English as a second language or family issues qualifying for support.

This support, awarded under a system known as additional support needs (ASN), can vary widely from school to school, ranging from having a personal assistant to one-on-one time with a teacher. Yet in practice, as the number of pupils with special needs rises, little support is offered at all.

There are fears that the surge in pupils entitled to ASN has created a two-tier education system, with children who don’t qualify for extra support missing out. The sharp increase in special needs has also added to intense financial pressure on Scottish government finances.

For those on the frontlines, such as Sharon, it is clear that the system is broken.

“The amount of turnover that we go through because of the burnout, because of how stressful the job is, that by the time we get people actually in the job – once all the paperwork is done, you’ve normally found that two people have left anyway, so you kind of feel like you’re always chasing your tail,” she says.

To many, the example of Scotland should be a cautionary tale. Yet Labour intends to move England closer to the system in place north of the border.

Under plans announced in February by Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, England plans to copy Scotland by educating more special educational needs and disability (Send) children in mainstream schools.

The Education Secretary also wants to follow Scotland’s example by restricting access to extremely specialist provision.

She may want to consult people like Sharon.

“It’s not just the school system that’s failing,” she says. “I think it’s additional support needs in general.”

Rapidly rising ASN numbers

Part of the reason Scotland has recorded such a large rise in the proportion of pupils requiring further help is the broad range of categories used to determine that a child has an ASN.

​Among the reasons a child can be deemed to require extra support is having English as a second language, communication support needs and family issues. All of these categories do not exist in England.

The current system for additional support needs in Scotland was introduced by Peter Peacock, an education minister under the Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition in the early 2000s.

​Having English as a second language is now the second most common reason for having an ASN, with 61,107 of Scotland’s 299,445 ASN students falling under this category last year.

Scotland follows the same immigration policy as the rest of the UK. However, the nation began to experience an increase in net migration from 2006 and Glasgow was the only asylum dispersal area in Scotland until 2022.

​There has also been a significant increase in the number of pupils who have an ASN because of social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, rising from 31,684 in 2015 to 77,405 in 2025.

Keir Bloomer, one of the architects of Scotland’s national curriculum and a former local authority education director, says the rapid rise in the numbers is unbelievable.

​“There is no way in which actual, verifiable needs are increasing at the speed that children are being added to the list of those deemed to have ASN,” he says.​

He believes some parents are pushing for their children to get an ASN. For some, ensuring their child is deemed to have ASN is “founded in a belief that, by one means or another, your child will be placed at an advantage by having this label”.

Under Scotland’s Additional Support for Learning Act 2004, children with an ASN are entitled to extra support to meet their physical, communication, social, emotional or mental health needs.

However, the act does not say how much or what type of support each pupil should get. Instead, it is based on their individual needs.

Critics say the current system encourages parents to push for their child to be classified as having special needs to give them the upper hand during exam time.

Bloomer says there is “a feeling that there are advantages that can be derived for the individual from it”.

The latest figures reflect this. Figures from the Scottish Qualifications Authority show that the number of invigilators required in secondary schools during the exam period has risen from 5,805 in 2018 to 8,014 in 2025 – a 38pc rise – as demand for individual rooms, scribes and additional exam time grows.

One school had to provide an additional 38 rooms with invigilators alongside its typical exam arrangements to meet demand for adjustments for children with an ASN.​

​The number of requests for special exam arrangements has also increased during the last decade, climbing from 57,200 in 2018 to 119,405 in 2025 – a 109pc rise.

In Glasgow, the surge is raising fears of a two-tier system where those who don’t qualify for special support are effectively being penalised.

Mike Corbett, Scotland’s national official for the teachers’ union NASUWT, says: “If almost half of the pupils in the country have an identified additional support need, then it’s almost not additional any more. It’s become mainstream.”

A major cost for councils

​The Scottish Government has said the wide net cast for those who need additional help provides a more inclusive approach. However, the rapid rise in the proportion of children with ASN is putting pressure on local government finances.

Local authorities in Scotland control both the level and allocation of education budgets, with about a third of spending centrally managed by the council and two thirds delegated to schools.

By contrast, in England, more than 90pc of funding is devolved to schools.​

Councils spent £1bn on special educational needs in 2023-24.

Some areas of spending are rising rapidly. Councils spent £94.2m on school taxis in the 2024-25 academic year, up from £30m in 2014-15. The majority went towards school runs for children with additional support needs.

As spending gets diverted to transport, resources are being stretched more thinly or are even in decline. Official figures show that the number of specialist ASN teachers in Scotland has fallen from 3,524 in 2010 to 2,837 in 2024.

Councils face a growing battle to justify each pound of spending. Earlier this year, Glasgow city council admitted that it faced a £14.5m black hole in its budget for 2026-27.

“The pressure on local government finances is huge and with the demand increasing and not being met, you’ve also got pressure to reduce the teacher contact time, to keep teacher numbers up,” says Willie Rennie, the Scottish Liberal Democrats’ education spokesman.

A Glasgow City Council spokesman said the local authority provides “an extensive range of support for children and young people with additional support needs” and was “firmly committed to meeting the needs of all our pupils”.

In Scotland, funding for ASN has climbed by 22pc between 2020 and 2026 when adjusted for inflation. However, it has risen by even more in England, where spending on Send has jumped by 54pc in real terms over the same period, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

Scotland has been able to limit increases by restricting coordinated support plans (CSPs), which provide a legal entitlement and spell out individual teaching requirements for children with the most complex needs.

The number of students with CSPs dropped to a record low of 0.2pc in 2025. ​By contrast, the proportion of students with the equivalent document in England – an education, health and care (EHC) plan – has risen from 2.8pc in 2015 to 5.3pc in 2025, which has significantly pushed up spending on Send.

While limiting CSPs benefits councils, there are concerns that Scottish pupils who are most in need of support are missing out.

Luke Sibieta, from the IFS, says: “If needs are genuinely increasing really rapidly, then the fact that schools have fixed budgets for these kinds of needs does put pressure and spread support more thinly.”

However, he adds: “It’s not clear that it is a really big surge in need.”

​He warns that it is difficult to determine whether the numbers had shown a significant increase in need or if the broad definition of ASN was capturing a larger proportion of pupils.

‘We don’t have the staff or the provisions’

While some parents may believe an ASN ruling for their child will help them, teachers aren’t so sure.

In Scotland, the education system requires that local authorities educate children with an ASN in mainstream schools rather than specialist institutions.

Many children with moderate needs end up being placed in a specialist unit within a school for many of their lessons. Kevin*, a teacher at a special-needs school in Glasgow, says many students are being “shoved into these units” as numbers spiral higher.

Units that were “usually for four, five, six kids are now 40 or 50 children,” he claims. “I think they’re just looking for a place to put these kids.”

Sharon says staffing is one of the biggest issues at her school.

“There’s a lot of people that think: that’s not who I want to work with. I don’t want to be spat at every day. I don’t want to be hit and punched and pinched every day and that is the reality for some of our more complex learners, that we are.”

It creates a vicious circle: “We don’t have the staff or the provisions to meet the needs of these children, so they’re lashing out.”

The exclusion rate for pupils with ASN is five times higher than for those without the provision, at 28.9 exclusions per 1,000 pupils compared to 5.8 in 2024-25​.

Those with an ASN also have a lower school attendance rate at 88.2pc, compared to 92.9pc for those without an ASN.​

Seamus Searson, the general secretary of the Secondary School Teachers Association, says: ​“The youngsters, if they’re not getting the support, they’re not engaging in education. So eventually they drop out by either not coming any more, or their frustration gets the better of them and they’re often in internal exclusion.”

After leaving school, Sharon says many of her former pupils are unlikely to get more than one day a week at a college or half a day at a centre for adults with special needs. Many parents of young adults with special needs are being forced to leave their jobs and become full-time carers because “resources are so stretched”, she adds.

All this feeds through to Holyrood’s welfare spending. Adults with disabilities or long-term health conditions can claim benefits to help cover living costs whether in or out of work.

Spending on adult disability payments is forecast to climb from £3.1bn in 2024-25 to £5.3bn by 2030-31, according to the Scottish Fiscal Commission.

The rapid rise comes amid wider concerns about the sustainability of Scotland’s public finances. Official figures show Scotland’s public spending deficit stood at £26.2bn in 2024-25.
​
The fiscal watchdog highlighted the fact that the “disability prevalence” for children in Scotland had risen sharply since the pandemic, climbing from 6pc in 2020-21 to 12pc in 2024-25.

As the number of children with an ASN rises, so too has the nation’s benefits bill.

In 2025, the percentage of children receiving disability payments in Scotland was higher than in both England and Wales, despite being at a similar level just five years earlier.

Mental or behavioural conditions were behind three quarters of child disability claims, the Scottish Fiscal Commission said.

Worryingly, the number of children receiving payments for these conditions has more than doubled in four years, rising from approximately 30,000 in 2020-21 to 65,000 in 2024-25.

Miles Briggs, the Scottish Conservatives’ education spokesman, says “a fundamentally new system is needed” for students with special educational needs and disabilities.

“Classrooms in Scotland are approaching breaking point, with record numbers requiring additional support, rising violence and fewer trainee teachers making it into the workforce,” he says.

Today’s approach to special needs education in Scotland is based on a 1978 report by Baroness Warnock. The 48-year-old report estimated that at any given moment, around 2pc of children would be considered to have special educational needs – vastly different to the picture today.

“It is quite clear that the system now has a momentum of its own, which will consume ever-increasing quantities of resources to no discernible educational benefit. Therefore, we must look again,” Bloomer says.

A ‘growing gap’

As Phillipson prepares to copy elements of the Scottish model, some north of the border believe the knowledge transfer should be going the other way.

​Unlike in England, there are only a handful of private schools focused on special needs north of the border.

Falkland House School, which has a sites in Perth and Fife, is among them. It focusses on providing education for children with autism and, unlike mainstream schools, class sizes are kept to six children, meaning teachers can provide tailored support.

Paddy Gannon, Falkland House’s head teacher, believes large mainstream schools are unlikely to provide the support many children with an ASN need.

Referring to the fact that 43pc of children across Scotland qualified for an ASN, he says: “We can’t say with any confidence that 43pc of the education provision is geared and set up for the kids with ASN ... Provision is still playing catch-up in that sense.”

The school fees at Falkland House are typically paid for by the council, with pupils granted a place following the approval of a local authority.

Gannon says funding constraints have created an “unquestionably challenging” situation for councils, many of which are focused on the budget for the year ahead rather than a long-term plan for additional support within schools.

But the model he advocates seems to be working.

A report from Education Scotland published in January found that teaching at Falkland House School and support of pupils’ wellbeing meant “more children and young people are engaging with their learning successfully”.

While there is yet to be a sweeping expert-led review of the ASN system, a 24-page report by the Scottish Government published last month warned of a “growing gap” in the support children are expected to receive and what they actually get.

The report, produced by Janie McManus, a former chief inspector of education, warned that the system had not kept pace with the rapid changes in the needs of pupils across Scotland.

​Back in Glasgow, as teachers prepare for a new term, Sharon is pessimistic.

“When you look at the class and you know for the entire academic year, you’re probably not going to meet their needs due to the fact there’s either too many of them, not enough staff, or you’re in a school that just doesn’t have the space or the resources to meet them, that’s quite soul-destroying,” she says.​

[Source: Daily Telegraph]