Ms Jacqueline Campbell:

We will probably come back and give the Senator some additional information in writing about the legislation. We have broad, overarching legislation on health and social care in Scotland that gives people a right to care. There is nothing I am aware of that would specifically address the point the Senator has set out around a right to that assessment. The way that is covered is more around the process I had been speaking about earlier about the specification that is being set out locally for standards we are monitoring people against. That is not legislative, however. That is a direction to local areas to set up services that will deliver on that set of standards. That is where things sit on that.

I mentioned that legislation will be coming forward in Scotland. There will be a big discussion and debate over the rest of this year on the kind of rights that Bill should contain. This will include whether we end up having a commissioner, which would be about accessing and supporting those rights. There will a big discussion about what rights we should include in that Bill. That Bill will be specifically for neurodivergent people. There are a range of ways it may go. The view from our recent panel of people with lived experience was that the Bill should include all neurodivergent issues.

This is obviously a significant issue also because it interacts with a range of things that are happening in Scotland at quite a significant level at the moment. We are bringing into Scots laws some of the UN treaties. The treaty around people with disabilities is being incorporated into Scots law, which is a significant move. We are looking at that regarding what will end up in our Bill. We have other major pieces of work going on that interact around the rights piece. One is the review of mental health legislation, which I mentioned earlier, and the establishment of a national care service in Scotland. All these things are pretty significant and linked.

The Senator also asked about school places. There are different processes that parents have to go through locally if they are looking to place a child with more significant needs into a non-mainstream school environment. I will probably have to come back to the Senator to set out the process around that. A majority will be in mainstream schools. There are limited numbers of places in those special school arrangements. That would probably have to be funded locally by a local authority, so there would potentially be different processes in different areas for how that would be accessed.

A majority, as I say, are in the mainstream. That is why the work that was referenced by one of the speakers around education has been significant in terms of ensuring that experience that people have in mainstream school is acceptable. That has actually not got any easier with the intervention of the Covid-19 pandemic, because the experience in Scotland will be the same as elsewhere for autistic young people. Often, there can be a benefit in not having to go physically to school. There was, however, a knock-on effect that happened after Covid-19 where that disruption for all children and young people was certainly magnified for autistic children and young people. School refusing can be a really major issue for parents, as can being able to access enough of the right kind of support.

In terms of support for parents, we are really aware in Scotland of mental health, sitting as we do within the mental health directorate. The community supports I mentioned earlier are accessible by parents because we are recognising that you have to strengthen that family unit, because if that front-line support for parents is not there and parents are not supported themselves, then it is very unlikely that they will be able to continue to feed that support to their children. We certainly recognise that. As with the other things we are doing on autism, it is a developing story for us as well around issues like post-diagnostic support.

We have a patchwork of things going on. For children and young people, support for them and other parents will be accessed through the school and an educational context so there tends to be that three-way relationship between: the school; the professionals in CAMHS; and the family and the children and young people. More often than not it would be built right around that educational context and different areas of the country will have different supports available with different amounts of funding going into them. That is when we are specifically talking about support for autistic children.

What we also have from the work my team does is we have, from Covid onwards, a limited support that we call post-diagnostic support. It is not strictly post-diagnostic, however. That has included support for parents of autistic children. We have had that in place, we have run the pilot over the last couple of years and we extended it because of Covid. Now we are transitioning to a more formal post-diagnostic support scheme which will kick off this year. We are supported with £1 million from programme for Government funding, which is a start and it is allowing us to think about criteria for that fund and what kind of support we want to put in place. Additionally to that, through one of our main third sector charities in Scotland, Scottish Autism, we fund its advice line. That advice line is a significant source of support for parents. Scottish Autism has seen calls to that line increase exponentially since Covid and that is why we support that work. It is not perfect but we have a number of things we are trying to do and promote.