Staff say plans are in place to spend less time with students to encourage 'independent learning', while they feel learners will benefit from teaching time.
Pupils with additional support needs and their parents have warned that cuts at a college in Glasgow will have a devastating effect on some of Scotland's most vulnerable people.
Laura Gallagher is a parent whose son, Taylor, has attended the college for the past two years but says he will now have to finish at CoGC because there is no support for him. "In those two years he has thrived, he’s now socialising, he’s turned up today to support everyone else and he’s got his voice.
“I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do it without my lecturers, they helped a lot. That’s why I’m supporting them today.”Sophia Fulston said:"I’m a student on the transitions course, which I enrolled in because I thought it would help me reintegrate back into“It’s helped a lot, because I wasn’t diagnosed very early with autism and this was the first time being surrounded by other people with autism.
“It’s helps you embrace your autism, it makes you feel normal and they don’t judge you. At school you had to mask it and act like people who don’t have autism.“The lecturers are more chilled, they understand you a lot better and they understand what kind of help and support you’re going to need." “It’s not easy making the jump from school to college at any time, mainstream or if you have an additional support need, but when you’ve got autism and you’re an adolescent we’re asking you to cope with major change at a time in your life when you’re majorly changing.
"There used to be 10 student support lecturers, now there are two and they’re being phased out and replaced by a private organisation. Don MacKeen, who has been a lecturer on the transitions course for 20 years underlined the societal impact of people with additional support needs being lost to further education.He said:"You’re already dealing with marginalised people who have high rates of unemployment, so it’s pulling the rug out from under these students, the opportunity for them to become independent, to become productive members of society is really reduced.
Stuart Brown, National Officer for Further Education with EIS said: “Colleges are extremely important to their communities, and one of the most important things they do is cater for people who are perhaps left behind, have struggled at school or just didn’t get what they needed our of the school education system.
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