Noting the link made by the Educational Institute for Scotland (EIS) between unmet pupil support needs and reports of in-school aggression, the Leader asks whether the number of pupils in Scotland with additional support needs (ASN) has markedly increased in the last few years.

The answer is yes, as The Scotsman would easily discover by looking back through its own reporting, for example on the “desperate need for more child mental health support” post-pandemic (15 March 2022), the "thousands" of Scottish children waiting years for mental health services (3 May 2021) and the rates of those denied help (11 November 2022). As you have also reported, wait times for neurodevelopmental diagnoses have risen to between two and four years in most NHS regions of Scotland (4 December 2022).

We should not be surprised that, of the many thousands of Scottish children waiting years for support with these challenges – to say nothing of the additional pressures of child hunger and poverty – a minority are struggling in school up to the point of displaying “disruptive” or even aggressive behaviour.

Teachers should not have to face violence from pupils - but what is the answer? (Picture: Adobe)

Tackling the problem indeed requires proper analysis and a fuller data picture. But exclusions are not the answer and they risk shoring up problems for the future. As the EIS indicated in Mr Ross’s article, “real solutions” would require proper resourcing of child mental health services and ASN provision, including options for those who need to learn outside of a school setting. But The Scotsman’s call for more exclusions to “teach consequences” is a short-sighted and callous prescription for a generation of struggling children.

Gillian Sheehan, North Berwick, East Lothian

Coal goals

Lord Deben, former chair of the Climate Change Committee, reckons: “False propaganda put out by the oil industry risks global catastrophe” (Perspective, 19 July). He writes: “At COP26, the UK led the world to sign up to net-zero. We even got close to agreeing to a clear phase-out for coal and gas generation.” Not correct. Only five countries have legally binding Climate Change Acts – Sweden, UK, France, Denmark and New Zealand; the other 190 countries only made promises which are being broken.

Lord Deben is well aware that at COP 26 in November 2021, China, India, US and other countries stubbornly refused to agree to “phase out” coal and only agreed to “phase down” coal and refused to commit to when this “phase down” would start. China, India, the United States, South Africa, Japan, Russia, Australia, South Korea and others are consuming even more coal to provide cheap electricity so it would be true to say that they are in the “phase up” situation.

Lord Deben says: “We will still have to face down the falsehoods of the climate delayers.” What about the falsehoods of the wind industry which prophesied tens of thousands of Scottish jobs? Instead the wind turbines were manufactured abroad, shipped here by foreign ships, erected by foreign labour and are now owned by foreign companies.

Clark Cross, Linlithgow, West Lothian

Ice packed

Geoff Moore asks if natural climate change has “disappeared” (Letters, 17 July). No, it hasn't; it can't. Earth’s climate has always varied, for various reasons, but mainly due to variations in the Earth's elliptical orbit around the sun. Sometimes this has made the planet hotter and sometimes colder. We are presently in an interglacial period, ie we are in an ice age but one in which ice sheets have retreated.

In fact, if we hadn't interfered with the climate with man-made greenhouse gas emissions, the planet would have cooled with an increase in ice sheets. We have stopped that but are now heading for hothouse Earth.

Steuart Campbell, Edinburgh

Algeria and irony

North Berwick resident Jean-Luc Barbanneau appears to inhabit a different country to most of us (Perspective, 18 July). He enthuses that: “Community is in the air and in the mood here, not just because the public good is still valued but also in commonly displayed attitudes – it’s never difficult to find evidence of a society imbued with a profound sense of solidarity.”

Some would dispute this apparent tribute to Scottish exceptionalism, arguing that such community spirit is present in many small, affluent coastal towns throughout the United Kingdom. To suggest that Scotland (unlike England) has “a profound sense of solidarity” is curious, considering that since 2014 we’ve become a bitterly polarised and divided society.

It’s impossible not to feel sympathy for this Brexit-fleeing serial expat, originally hounded from his childhood home in Algeria by separatists when it broke away from Metropolitan France in the Sixties.

Yet there’s irony when Monsieur Barbanneau sympathises with the “despair and hopelessness” behind recent riots in French cities by some Algerian migrants: people themselves driven into exile, this time by decades of poverty and instability following Algerian independence.

Martin O’Gorman, Edinburgh

Spend and prosper

Labour’s ironclad “fiscal rules” are regularly invoked as an excuse to not spend money because, the claim goes, there’s none left. The rules justify Keir Starmer’s latest U-turn on the two-child benefit cap that has sent his shadow cabinet ministers scurrying to defend the indefensible. In fact, the rules are made up, a self-imposed straitjacket because politicians pretend, or actually believe, that government finances are like a household’s. They aren’t.

Taxes don’t fund government spending. Government spending, via its central bank, does. A government can always spend what it wants, subject only to the constraints of inflation and the productive capacity of the economy. When the government spends money, it becomes someone else’s wages and savings. By paying nurses and teachers enough to live on, they can afford housing, food and energy, and they contribute to healthier and better-educated people. The UK spends less on health and education than Germany or France, which partly explains its relatively poor economic performance. When governments spend on making all people healthier and more productive, rather than just the wealthy few, the result is growth, new jobs and no inflation.

Labour’s “fiscal rules” are designed to prevent a future Labour government from carrying out its only duty – to support its citizens. In that respect, they are no different from the Tories. And that’s why Scotland must leave.

Leah Gunn Barrett, Edinburgh

Two became one

I was a trifle puzzled by Dr Francis Roberts' comments on Derek Farmer, who, he says, “plays about a bit too much with history” in “putting forward his positive case for the merits of the UK” (Letters, 19 July). I am afraid that it is Dr Roberts whose history is in need of correction as his own comments confirm Derek Farmer's case.

He claims that “the UK was not the first to recognise the inhumanity of slavery”, insisting that it was “the Court of Session in 1777”; in other words, a Scots court. It seems that Dr Roberts' assertions are that a legal decision made in Scotland was, in some way, nothing to do with the UK and that Derek Farmer's comments are therefore incorrect. It seems that Dr Roberts is unclear as to what constituted the UK at that time.

Perhaps he would benefit from examining Scotland's (and England's) absorption into the United Kingdom in 1707? As the Treaty of Union said, “the two Kingdoms of Scotland and England, shall, upon the first Day of May next [ie 1707] ensuing the Date hereof, and for ever after, be united into one Kingdom” to be called “the united [sic] Kingdom of Great-Britain [sic]”.

He refers to a number of Scottish legal cases and also one in England made by Lord Mansfield in support of his assertions but, rather oddly, omits to mention, as confirmation of the United Kingdom's existence at that time, that Lord Mansfield himself was a Scot who became Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench (of England and Wales).

Andrew HN Gray, Edinburgh

Warm welcome

I welcome the entry to the UK of 2,000 Afghan interpreters and their families. It seems to me they have earned the right to be here, having learned our language, having useful skills and having waited for their turn to come here through legitimate channels.

Mass immigration tends, as does mass tourism, to despoil the objectives of the participants; in the first case by diluting and so threatening the very culture which attracted them here in the first place; and in the second case by polluting and overcrowding former sites of beauty, peace and quiet.

I hope our new Brits from Afghanistan find welcome, suitable accommodation, gainful employment and a happy life here.

Tim Flinn, Garvald, East Lothian

Lose five points?

Let us hope that Amol Rajan, as the new presenter of long-running BBC2 quiz show University Challenge, resists the temptation to do what he so frequently does on BBC Radio 4's Today programme: answer the questions he asks.

Martin Redfern. Melrose, Roxburghshire

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Readers' Letters: Exclusions are not the answer to classroom violence

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