In Scotland, 43% of children are now identified as having some form of Additional Learning Need. Nearly half of all children in a modern, developed education system are being flagged as requiring support beyond what that system routinely provides. That number demands a response. And the response it most commonly receives — more assessments, more labels, more intervention — may be precisely the wrong one.
A Question Worth Asking Clinical psychologist Dr Naomi Fisher, writing in her Substack Think Again, puts it simply and powerfully: if 43% of children have needs which are not met in the mainstream education system, perhaps it is time to ask whether that mainstream system is fit for purpose. It is worth noting that Scotland’s definition of Additional Support Needs is broader than England’s Special Educational Needs framework — encompassing not just diagnosable conditions but also bereavement, family circumstances, and other life factors. The statistics are not directly comparable. But the underlying question remains just as urgent on either side of the border: why are so many children struggling in systems that were designed, at considerable public expense, to serve them?
The System We Have Built We have created an education system that does not adequately consider the developmental needs of children. One that introduces increasingly rigid academic expectations from an early age. That expects young children to sit still when their bodies need to move, to focus on reading and writing when they are primed to learn through exploration and play. That sends teenagers into large, impersonal schools where they move through the day without meaningful connection to any adult who truly knows them. That measures success through test results, and communicates — explicitly or implicitly — that falling short of those results means a diminished future. And then, when children show us that this is not working for them, we look at the children. We refer them for assessment. We write reports documenting how they are not performing as expected. We label them as disruptive, disengaged, or disordered. We identify them as having additional needs — as if the need were theirs alone, rather than a need created, at least in part, by the environment they are placed in.
The Harder We Look, The More We Find There is something telling in the trajectory of these numbers. According to the Educational Institute of Scotland, the proportion of pupils identified with Additional Support Needs rose from just 5% in 2007 to 43% in 2025 — a growth of over 710% in less than two decades. The more rigid the system becomes, the more children there are who cannot meet its expectations. The harder we look for children who do not fit, the more we find. This is not evidence of a growing epidemic of childhood disorder. It is evidence of a growing mismatch between how children develop and what we are asking them to do. Children need flexibility. They need movement, connection, curiosity, and time. They need to be known. The system, as currently designed, provides precious little of any of these things — and then expresses surprise when children struggle.
The Question That Changes Everything At DLC, we carry Dr Fisher’s question at the heart of everything we build: is the problem the children, or the system that was never designed with their needs in mind? We know our answer. And we are building around it.
This post was inspired by and adapted from “Forty-Three Percent” by Dr Naomi Fisher (Think Again, December 2025), drawing on data published by the Scottish Government and the Educational Institute of Scotland. At DLC, we are always listening to the thinkers and researchers shaping our understanding of what education could and should be.