One in three youngsters are now identified as having additional support needs in class – compared to below one in ten a decade ago.
This comes just three months after tUnison spoke out about learning assistants suffering from stress, being overworked, and staff shortages.
A controversial restructuring of learning assistants throughout the region’s schools is due to be discussed at the council’s education committee next Tuesday.
A report for the meeting states: “Concerns about the learning assistant allocation process are predominantly focussed on the increasing demand for the provision of learning assistant hours to support individual children.
“Over the last ten years the number of children identified with additional support needs has increased from below one-in-ten to one-in-three of the total school population.
“The rise in pupils with additional support needs is recognised nationally.
“This increase in numbers is also a consequence of a broadening of the types of need that may require additional support for learning, including: looked after children, children of parents in the armed forces, bereavement, and young carers.
“Consequently, while additional support for learning (ASL) resources over the last 10 years have remained relatively stable, the rise in the number of children and young people identified with an additional support need has risen sharply and created a level of expectation for targeted support that puts significant pressure on existing budgets.”
Council education chiefs are calling for a review of the learning assistant allocation process, and for a range of options to be brought back to the education committee in November.
Trade union leaders warned that any changes may lead to cuts and an even heavier workload in some schools.
A council spokeswoman said: “Each year we work to a budget that gives us a weekly allocation of hours, which is then distributed across all our schools and learning environments by using school data and information from education plans about levels of need. We do not allocate hours to individual children, we allocate hours to our schools and the headteacher then uses the allocation as required. Some schools have seen their allocation reduce while others have seen their allocation increase.”
