Scotland's Inclusion Policy: What Parents Need to Know

Scotland has made it almost impossible to permanently exclude a pupil from school. Whether you think that’s progressive or dangerous depends on which side of the classroom your child sits on.

The policy is called inclusion, and it is built on two legal pillars: the presumption of mainstreaming (most children with additional support needs should be educated in mainstream schools) and a near-total discouragement of exclusion as a disciplinary tool. Together, they have transformed Scottish classrooms over the past two decades. The question parents are asking — and that politicians are only now beginning to take seriously — is whether it has gone too far.

What the presumption of mainstreaming actually means

The law presumes that every child, regardless of additional support needs, should attend a mainstream school unless one of three conditions applies:

1. It would be incompatible with providing suitable education for the child — meaning the mainstream school genuinely cannot meet the child’s needs.
2. It would have a serious impact on the education of other children in the school.
3. It would result in unreasonable public expenditure — where specialist provision is significantly cheaper and equally effective.

In theory, condition two gives schools a way to protect other pupils. In practice, councils apply it extremely rarely. The political pressure runs in one direction: keep children in mainstream.

The exclusion numbers

The statistics tell a stark story.

• Permanent exclusions have fallen by over 90% since 2006. Across all of Scotland — roughly 700,000 pupils — the number of permanent exclusions in recent years has been in single digits. Some years it has been zero or near-zero.
• Temporary exclusions have also fallen sharply, though they still occur — roughly 10,000 to 15,000 instances per year, concentrated in secondary schools and disproportionately affecting boys from deprived areas.
• Several councils have adopted explicit no-exclusion policies, and all councils are under Scottish Government pressure to drive the numbers down further.

The direction of travel is clear. Scotland does not want to exclude children from school, and the system is structured to make exclusion as difficult as possible for head teachers to use.

The case for inclusion

Inclusion is not just a policy preference — it is rooted in children’s rights and, at its best, in evidence.

• Children with ASN have a right to be educated alongside their peers. Segregating children into separate schools carries social costs: stigma, reduced expectations, weaker peer models.
• When properly resourced, inclusive classrooms can benefit everyone. Research (including work cited by the Scottish Government) suggests that all pupils can gain from diverse classrooms where support is well-managed.
• Exclusion does not fix behaviour. Excluded children are more likely to offend, less likely to achieve qualifications, and more likely to end up outside education altogether. The evidence on this is strong.
• Most ASN children are not disruptive. The vast majority of the 230,000+ pupils with recorded ASN in Scotland need quiet, targeted support — not behaviour management. Conflating ASN with disruption is inaccurate and harmful.

The case against how inclusion is being implemented

The principle of inclusion commands broad support. The problem is the gap between the principle and the reality in classrooms.

• Teachers report being overwhelmed. EIS (Scotland’s largest teaching union) surveys have consistently found that teachers do not feel adequately trained or supported to manage the range of needs in their classrooms. Large classes with multiple pupils requiring intensive support and no additional staffing is not inclusion — it is containment.
• Violence against staff is rising. Teacher unions report significant increases in physical assaults, verbal abuse and threats from pupils, particularly in primary schools. A 2023 NASUWT survey found that more than half of respondents had experienced some form of physical aggression from a pupil in the preceding 12 months. EIS has repeatedly called the situation a crisis.
• Parents of well-behaved children say learning is being disrupted. This is the complaint that schools find hardest to answer. When one pupil’s behaviour absorbs the teacher’s attention for significant portions of the lesson, the other 29 pupils lose out. Parents who raise this are sometimes made to feel that they lack compassion — but their children’s education matters too.
• Part-time timetables are being used as a workaround. Some children with challenging behaviour are placed on reduced timetables — attending school for only a few hours a day. This keeps them off the exclusion statistics but often means they receive very little education. The Scottish Children’s Commissioner has raised concerns about this practice.

What schools use instead of exclusion

Councils have developed a range of alternatives, though availability and quality vary significantly across Scotland.

• Nurture rooms — small, calm spaces within the school staffed by trained nurture practitioners, offering structured support for children struggling in the mainstream classroom.
• Behaviour support staff — additional adults in classrooms or attached to specific pupils who help manage behaviour and de-escalate situations.
• Part-time or flexible timetables — reducing the hours a child attends, sometimes combined with input from external services. Effective when well-managed; problematic when it becomes a permanent reduction with no plan to increase hours.
• Outreach from specialist services — educational psychologists, social workers, CAMHS, and third-sector organisations providing support to the child and the school.
• Restorative practice — a structured approach to repairing relationships after conflict, used widely in Scottish schools as an alternative to punishment.
• Specialist units attached to mainstream schools — some schools have on-site units where pupils can receive intensive support while remaining on the school roll and transitioning back to classes as they are ready.

Your rights if your child is being affected

If your child’s education is being disrupted by what is happening in the classroom, you have the right to act.

1. Raise it with the class teacher — start here. Be specific about the impact on your child’s learning. The school cannot discuss another child’s circumstances with you, but it can address the impact on yours.
2. Request a meeting with the head teacher — if the problem persists, escalate. Ask what support the school is receiving and what strategies are in place.
3. Contact the council’s education department — if the school is not resolving the issue, go to the council. Ask about additional support staffing for the class and whether any specialist input has been sought.
4. Make a formal complaint — use the council’s complaints procedure. If the complaint is not resolved, you can escalate to the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO).
5. Consider a placing request — if the situation is untenable, you have the right to request a place at a different school. This does not guarantee a move, but it is an option.

Focus on your child’s educational experience, not on naming other pupils. Schools respond better to “my child is not learning effectively in this environment” than to demands to remove a classmate.

The political landscape

The Scottish Government has been firmly committed to inclusion and the reduction of exclusions for over two decades. This is not a party-political issue in the way it is in England — it has cross-party support in principle. The Additional Support for Learning review (the Angela Morgan review, 2020) reinforced the inclusion agenda while acknowledging that implementation was falling short.

But pushback is growing. Teacher unions are increasingly vocal. Parent groups have begun organising around the issue of classroom disruption. Media coverage has shifted from celebrating inclusion to questioning whether it is working. Some councils are quietly acknowledging that they lack the resources to deliver inclusion properly.

The Scottish Government’s response has been to promise more support rather than to revisit the policy itself. Additional ASN funding has been announced, but unions and councils say it does not close the gap. The core tension remains: the policy assumes a level of staffing and resource that many schools do not have.

Where we stand on this

Inclusion is the right principle. Children should not be segregated from their peers unless there is a genuinely good reason. And the evidence on exclusion is clear — it does more harm than good to the excluded child and solves nothing for the school in the long term.

But a principle without funding is just a slogan. What is happening in too many Scottish classrooms is not inclusion — it is underfunded inclusion, where one teacher is expected to meet the needs of 30 children with wildly different requirements, no support assistant, and no realistic option to say “I cannot manage this safely.” That is not fair on the teacher, not fair on the child with additional needs, and not fair on the other 29 children in the room.

The answer is not to go back to routine exclusions. The answer is to fund the policy properly: more support staff, smaller classes where needed, genuine access to educational psychology and CAMHS, and an honest acknowledgement from government that inclusion on the cheap is not inclusion at all. Until that happens, parents on both sides of this debate have legitimate grievances — and their children are paying the price.