Additional Support for Learning: review

Executive Summary

Scotland has a longstanding ambition that every child and young person is supported to learn, participate and make progress. Additional support for learning is a central part of how this is achieved. The ambition is unchanged, but the context has shifted significantly.

More children and young people require additional support. Staff describe increasing demand, pressure on time, capacity, and access to specialist input. Families experience variation in processes, thresholds, and access to support. As a result, support is not always available at the right time or experienced as consistent and predictable.

Wherever a child lives, support should be early, embedded in everyday learning, extended through targeted or specialist input where needed, coordinated across services, and able to adapt as needs change. These expectations reflect the features of practice that work well across Scotland when different parts of the system operate in a coherent and connected way.

This review draws on national datasets, audit evidence, professional insights and previous engagement with children, young people, families, and practitioners. It adopts a system-level perspective, examining how national expectations, local arrangements and day-to-day practice interact and influence decisions and experiences of support. Consistent patterns across sources highlight increasing demand and complexity; variation in local planning arrangements and thresholds; limited visibility of progress beyond recorded processes; pressures on workforce knowledge and capacity; and mixed experiences of multi-agency coordination.

Taken together, these findings show a gap between Scotland’s ambition for inclusion and how additional support is experienced. This gap is visible from the early years onwards. It is not a gap in commitment. It reflects a system that has had to adapt to levels and complexity of need that have evolved faster than the infrastructure designed to support them. Support often becomes more reliable only once needs escalate; early intervention is not always protected; and children and young people with similar needs do not always experience similar support.

The review identifies key areas that must be strengthened for additional support for learning to be delivered more consistently and sustainably. A clearer national approach to planning and decision-making is required so that staged intervention operates more reliably in practice. Workforce design must better reflect the realities of mainstream education, with sustained professional learning embedded from initial teacher education onwards. Capacity across education, health and social care must better support early and preventative intervention. A clearer national picture of children and young people’s needs, support and progress must inform decision-making and improvement. And a delivery model aligned to current levels of demand is needed so that staged intervention functions as an effective pathway.

Strengthening these areas would help ensure children, young people and families experience support that is earlier, clearer, and more consistent. Emerging needs would be recognised sooner. Decisions would be more predictable. Families would have greater clarity about processes and expectations. Staff would have the knowledge, time and specialist input required to act with confidence. Support would be less dependent on escalation and more focused on prevention. There would be a stronger understanding of children and young people’s progress and the impact of additional support.

To support this, the report makes six recommendations focused on national planning and staged intervention; workforce alignment; capacity for early intervention; visibility of need and progress; a coherent delivery model; and embedding additional support for learning within curriculum design, delivery, and assessment. These recommendations require a whole-system response.

Scotland’s ambition for inclusion remains clear, and strong practice exists across the country. Strengthening additional support for learning in the ways described in this report offers a practical path towards ensuring that children and young people experience support that is earlier, more consistent, and more reliable.