Questions about Enquire

Enquire is the Scottish advice service for additional support for learning. It is for pupils who need extra support in order to become successful learners, which will be recognised as one of the important capacities in Curriculum for Excellence. Advice and information is independent and provided to parents, carers, practitioners, children and young people. A parent is quoted on their website as saying: "I found the staff I spoke to extremely helpful, understanding and sympathetic," which is great because many parents will testify that in order to battle through the system to obtain extra help for their children they often had to wade through a jungle of jargonese and obfuscation, with little help at the end of it.

But reassuringly, visitors to the Enquire website are informed that additional support for learning is not just a good idea - it`s the law ! Therefore no battles required, perhaps.

It is not until one remembers that here in Scotland we have GIRFEC (Getting it right for EVERY child) and Curriculum for EXCELLENCE that the penny drops. Why would providing additional support for a child in need, not be the law?

Still, there are some pesky questions that remain. For instance, why is it that although a parent can ask for a specific assessment at any time for a child who has additional support needs, there is no timescale set out in law for a local authority to carry out the assessment, following which a service should be provided? After all, we have GIRFEC with its emphasis on early interventions which have the back up of evidence based research (so we are told) which indicate that there cannot be one minute`s delay, otherwise the child will be damaged beyond repair - and so will the economy.

OK we are dealing with different laws. There is the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004 and the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014. But surely GIRFEC trumps all previous laws since it includes EVERY child and its message is to share information, respond appropriately, and `do not delay.`

There might be an explanation for the, albeit, unintended contradictory information, provided on the Enquire website, if we take account of the date that the information was uploaded. Some of it has been provided before the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 became law. That makes sense. Well it does, until we remember that the Highland Council have been functioning with GIRFEC well before the Act came into force and Enquire have, and still are, providing their website services to the Highland Council.

Now that we have mentioned the pilot scheme, this leads to another question. Where is the named person in all of this? Why do we need Enquire if the NAMED PERSON is there functioning as the first point of contact for parents and children?

http://enquire.org.uk/what-is-additional-support-for-learning