Andrew Denholm Education Correspondent MINISTERS were last night facing calls to change the law to give parents of children with special needs more choice over where they go to school.
The Herald revealed yesterday that Scottish Executive legislation designed to give thousands of Scottish parents a greater say could end up restricting their options following a landmark legal ruling.
The 2004 Additional Support for Learning Act gave more families the right to request a place at an independent special school for their child if they felt it was better than the state alternative.
However, in a judgement on the legislation at the Court of Session in Edinburgh, Lord Glennie made a ruling which campaigners fear will make it much more likely parents will be refused such a place on the grounds of cost.
Last night, James Douglas-Hamilton, education spokesman for the Scottish Conservative Party, called for the act to be revised because it "disadvantages" Scotland's parents.
"My greatest concern when this legislation was going through was that there was a shift of emphasis away from the discretion of parents towards giving local authority employees more power over children with special needs," he said.
"Local authorities might be able to use the act in order to reduce expenditure for the most vulnerable and fragile members of our community and this worries me a great deal.
"The best interests of the child should always be paramount rather than issues of cost."
Fiona Hyslop, education spokeswoman for the SNP, also called for the interests of the child to be be given more weight in the process.
"When the legislation was being drafted, executive ministers stated that additional support needs services should be defined by need and not by cost. The concern would be that this ruling could give the green light for local authorities to ration additional support needs by cost, which may deny special school provision where it is needed."
However, Cosla, which represents local authorities, said councils were investing heavily in additional support for children with learning difficulties.
"Council education staff have a great deal of expertise in assessing the best type of provision on a child-by-child basis and while we always respect the views of parents, sometimes the state provision is the best alternative," added a spokesman.
"Cost is a factor in everything we do because we always have set budgets, but the interests of the child always come first."
Following the ruling, charities and campaigning groups warned that it could make it "significantly more difficult" for families of children with learning difficulties to go to a specialist school of their choice.
The case involves Jessica McArthur, a five-year-old blind girl with severe physical difficulties whose parents Sean and Nadine want her to go to the internationally-acclaimed Royal Blind School in Edinburgh, rather than Oaklands School, a state-funded alternative.
As part of the decision-making process, local authorities compare the cost of the two schools to decide whether the greater cost of the independent school is prohibitive - in the McArthur's case, the cost of Oaklands is £23,500 a year as opposed to £33,000 for the Royal Blind School.
However, Lord Glennie ruled at the Court of Session in Edinburgh that in future the existing running costs of the state school should no longer be included when comparing the two, making the gulf between state and private much wider.
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