Additional Support for Learning: review

Requirements for reliable delivery

Strengthening additional support for learning is not about new initiatives, but about ensuring that the core requirements for reliable delivery are in place and operating coherently. When these requirements operate well and at an early stage, preventative support is more likely to be sustained. When they are inconsistent, the system becomes more reactive, and support is more likely to be accessed through escalation.

The six requirements below set out what must be in place for Scotland to deliver effective support for children and young people, given the scale and complexity of need now present.

Requirement 1: A shared national approach to planning and decision-making

Planning and decision-making for additional support for learning presently vary across Scotland. Local authorities use different staged intervention models, thresholds, definitions, and planning formats. While these approaches reflect local contexts, they result in similar needs being responded to in different ways.

This means that children and young people do not always experience timely, equitable or predictable support, and families can face uncertainty navigating different processes and expectations.

This requires aligning existing local frameworks to a shared national approach. This includes developing clear national expectations on the application of thresholds, planning processes and statutory mechanisms, so that planning and decision‑making operate more consistently while retaining appropriate local flexibility and professional judgement.

A consistent national framework would enable staff to apply professional judgement within a shared structure, reduce avoidable variation, and support children, young people, and families to experience more predictable, timely and coordinated support regardless of where they live. Planning should be proportionate to need, with clear links between universal, targeted and specialist support.

Requirement 2: A workforce model aligned to the scale and complexity of need.

Additional support for learning is a central feature of day-to-day teaching and learning. However, the current workforce model does not yet consistently reflect the level of need present. Staff are working across a wider range of responsibilities, with high expectations for inclusive practice that are not always matched by the time, clarity or specialist input required.

Strengthening the workforce model to meet current demand requires the right mix of roles, expertise, and time for collaboration. Professional learning needs to be sustained, not episodic, and embedded across initial teacher education, ongoing professional development, and leadership pathways. It must build the depth of understanding required and reflect the central role of additional support for learning, ensuring that staff across the workforce have the knowledge and confidence to meet the full range of needs now present in mainstream classrooms.

It also has implications for curriculum design and delivery. Curriculum approaches and the support required to deliver them must reflect the full range of learners’ needs. As Scotland takes forward the curriculum improvement cycle and qualifications reform, additional support for learning should be embedded as a core component of curriculum design, implementation, and evaluation, alongside approaches to assessment.

This is not only about overall workforce capacity, but about the mix of roles, access to specialist expertise and time for collaboration, planning, and early intervention. Where this is not in place, support can be harder to sustain.

Without this alignment, the system will continue to operate in ways that make it difficult to deliver early and sustained support for children and young people.

Requirement 3: Capacity to deliver early and sustained support.

Capacity is not yet consistently sufficient or well enough organised to enable early intervention or to respond to emerging needs. This can make it harder to sustain support over time. When capacity is stretched, decisions are shaped by what can be delivered immediately rather than what is most effective over time. This makes early intervention harder to protect and can increase the likelihood that needs escalate before support becomes reliable.

Capacity must be planned, protected, and aligned across education, health social care, and specialist services so that support can be put in place at the earliest opportunity. This includes ensuring access to specialist input when required, helping schools and early learning and childcare settings to sustain support.

Strengthening capacity in this way will support more preventative intervention and improve confidence in how support is accessed and experienced by children, young people, and families.

Requirement 4: Clear and consistent multi-agency coordination

Many children and young people require support that spans education, health, and social care. Effective coordination across these services is therefore central to delivering support when it is needed.

While there are strong examples of collaboration, staff describe variation in the timing, availability, and coordination of multi-agency input. Differences in thresholds, access criteria, and expectations across services can make it more difficult to secure timely specialist involvement. This variability is also evident in early learning and childcare, where families comment on different routes to specialist input and inconsistent access to the coordinated support required to respond as needs first arise.

When multi-agency working is inconsistent, access to specialist support is not always available at the earliest opportunity. This can delay support, contribute to variation in how children and young people experience provision, and place greater responsibility on schools to manage complex needs without consistent input from wider services.

More reliable multi-agency coordination is therefore required so that services work to clear, shared pathways, roles are clearly understood, and specialist support can be accessed early and in a coordinated way. Universal, targeted and specialist support should operate as a connected pathway, with intervention matched to need at each stage. This would support earlier intervention, reduce reliance on escalation, and improve the consistency of support experienced by children and young people.

Requirement 5: Clear visibility of children and young people’s needs, support, and progress

There is currently stronger visibility of recorded processes and the nature of support than of children and young people’s needs, progress, and the impact of support. As a result, there is not always a coherent understanding of what progress looks like, or whether support is having the intended impact.

A clearer and more consistent approach is now needed in how information on needs, support and progress is captured and used. This should ensure that information reflects the outcomes that matter for children and young people, supports decision-making, and enables a shared national understanding of how well additional support for learning is improving outcomes across Scotland.

This includes strengthening how progress is evidenced beyond attainment measures and ensuring that data is used not only for reporting and categorisation, but to inform practice, improvement, and resource decisions. Inspection also plays an important role in contributing to this understanding by evaluating how effectively additional support for learning is delivered day-to-day and the difference this is making for children and young people.

Without stronger visibility and use of information, decision-making risks being shaped by what is most easily recorded rather than what most meaningfully reflects children and young people’s development and progress.

Requirement 6: A delivery model aligned to current system demand.

For additional support for learning to be delivered consistently and effectively, the system requires a clear and coherent delivery model. This should set out how staged intervention, universal, targeted and specialist support, and statutory planning mechanisms operate together.

While national policy sets out expectations for staged intervention and statutory planning, there is not yet a single, shared understanding of how these operate in reality. Local adaptations have enabled delivery to continue, but they have also created variation in how need is identified, interpreted, and responded to.

A delivery model aligned to current demand must ensure that staged intervention acts as a connected pathway, with support built systematically from the point at which needs first arise.

Co-ordinated Support Plans are an important part of the statutory framework, but their use is often associated with higher thresholds and more complex processes. This can mean that support becomes more formalised at a later stage, rather than forming part of a consistent, graduated approach from the outset.

A coherent delivery model also requires strong coordination across policy areas, recognising that additional support for learning is integral to how the education system operates. Without this alignment, services will continue to rely on escalation and local adaptation to manage demand, rather than being supported by a model that enables consistent, preventative, and sustainable support for children and young people.

It is also important to consider whether the current legislative framework continues to provide the clarity and consistency now required. This should include assessing whether existing statutory mechanisms and duties remain fit for purpose in enabling an effective and efficient model of delivery.