Physical Intervention in Schools – One Year Review of Guidance

Introduction

In November 2024, the Scottish Government published Physical Intervention in Schools – A Relationships and Rights-Based Approach: Guidance. This guidance is for education authorities, grant-aided schools, and independent schools in Scotland regarding the use of physical intervention.

The Scottish Government committed to undertaking a review one year after publication. The purpose of the review was to gather evidence on whether the guidance has been implemented and embedded across all schools, and to identify whether there is early evidence of improved practice.

The guidance promotes best practice in ensuring that all children and young people are safe and supported within a nurturing environment where additional support needs are recognised and well understood. It outlines preventative approaches to minimise the use of restraint and seclusion and provides alternative strategies that can be used instead.

The 2024 guidance is clear that restraint and seclusion should only be used as a last resort to prevent a risk of injury. Where restraint is used, the guidance offers advice on rights-based decision making and identifies the necessary safeguards that must be in place to ensure lawful practice and to protect the wellbeing of children, young people, and staff. It reflects education providers’ duty of care in relation to health, safety, and wellbeing. The guidance also sets out expectations for post incident support and for the reporting, recording, and monitoring of the use of restraint and seclusion.

For the review of this guidance, the Scottish Government received feedback from the following groups of respondents through a survey using SmartSurvey, an online survey platform:

• Local authorities – 30 responses
• Independent schools – 7 responses
• Grant aided schools – 2 responses
• Individual school staff – 22 responses
• Parents and carers – 112 responses
• The Care Inspectorate – 2 responses
• Trade unions – 5 responses^[1]

Questions were designed specifically for each group to gather feedback relevant to their experiences. All information was collected anonymously.

We received a total of 180 completed responses, with an additional 461 partial responses.

The Scottish Government also committed to engaging directly with children and young people about their lived experiences since the guidance came into effect in November 2024. This engagement is ongoing and findings will be published in due course.

This report summarises the findings of the survey, covering the period from the introduction of the guidance in November 2024 to December 2025. The survey was open for completion from 12 December 2025 to 17 February 2026. To protect against the risk of disclosure, some small response numbers have not been published. Individual questions were voluntary to answer, percentages presented here are for those who answered the question and not the total number of respondents.