Ladies and gentlemen, I am here today with a number of other families to ask for your help in ensuring the safety of Scotland’s most vulnerable children in Scotland’s schools.
The use of restrictive practices, including restraint and seclusion, in Scottish schools that care for disabled children is poorly understood and inconsistent, leading to many of our children suffering what we believe is, at best, institutional child abuse and, at worst, criminal assault.
My son Calum suffers from epilepsy and sensory and communication difficulties. As a small 11-year-old—he wears clothes for an eight-year-old—he came home from school with multiple bruises on his arms and legs. He had abrasions on his spine, his upper chest was covered in a petechial haemorrhaging rash and his lips were blue. The school told me that staff had “restrained” him on the floor. I was also told that he had urinated during the restraint. That happened twice in three days. Because of a current police investigation, I am unable to say much more than that.
Families from all over Scotland have told me about their children being restrained at school, causing injuries such as scratches, bruises and abrasions. I have heard of disabled but mobile children who use wheelchairs for extended walks being strapped in by so many straps that the chair was effectively being used as a mobile prison. The straps on one child’s wheelchair were so tight that the child could hardly breathe. We also hear of children being manhandled and dragged into what are called “safe spaces” without proper supervision or recording. We believe that that is a deprivation of their liberty and human rights.
We believe that, in many cases, disabled children are being subjected to restraint or seclusion as a punitive measure. Corporal punishment was banned in Scottish schools more than 30 years ago but, in our opinion, failures in guidance and scrutiny have allowed some schools to effectively reintroduce it illicitly for disabled children.
Disabled children have a right to be cared for by school staff who are trained in understanding the function of challenging behaviour. Many children and young people who have complex communication disorders and sensory and learning difficulties might present particular behavioural phenotypes.
All those things affect their behaviour and their ability to express themselves or to communicate their needs. Our children are often unable to say “I’m hungry, thirsty, tired. I’m in pain”. Without the training and knowledge that are essential in understanding the function of the behaviour, staff use restraint and seclusion to overpower and control the child using brute force. That is completely unacceptable.
We know that our experience is part of a much wider failure of public policy in Scotland, and that is what we desperately need the Parliament to address.
In schools, there is a lack of national guidance on support for and management of behaviour of children who have special needs, and a lack of appropriate independent regulatory oversight. Some guidance exists for children in residential care. That guidance, which is called “Holding Safely”, was not designed with any consideration of or expertise in disability. As such, it fails to take into account the complex support that young people who have special needs require.
“Holding Safely” might provide a starting point for a new national policy but it is not a substitute for it. We need guidance to protect children who often lack language skills and who are not believed when they speak up. Winterbourne View has taught us that sometimes the places that are meant to protect the most vulnerable can be the most dangerous.
At the moment, it is up to each local authority to develop its own policy on behaviour management and physical intervention. That has led to massive inconsistency in practice. There is also evidence of outdated thinking and, frankly, inhumane practice, where a failure to show any degree of empathy with or understanding of the child is evidenced by institutional treatment that would never be accepted if practised on a typically developed child.
Such ad hoc policies result in poor practice. There is little accountability, and there is no effective mechanism for parents or other professionals to challenge failures in local council schools. The lack of an independent regulator combined with outdated policies and poor training is a dangerous combination and provides an easy pathway for an abusive culture.
We need the Parliament to make the best practice that is apparent in some schools—such schools exist—become the norm in every school where special needs children are educated in Scotland, and to ensure that if abuse and neglect occur, there is a truly independent body that uncovers and deals with them as swiftly as possible.
Things are happening to disabled children in schools that would not be acceptable if those children were not disabled. Throughout Scotland, from Elgin to Edinburgh and from Dundee to Dumbarton, we know of children who have been put at risk and are damaged as a result. Please help us to protect Scotland’s children.