Inclusion Ambassadors primary school project underway

Enquire’s Advice and Information Officer, Beth Fyfe, explains the Inclusion Ambassadors Primary School Project and its recent work in Aberdeenshire.

All children have the right to be heard and for their views to be taken seriously. The Inclusion Ambassadors are a well-established voice for children and young people with additional support needs in Scotland. Following a successful pilot in June 2024, we’ve now been able to expand the project to include younger voices.

Our Inclusion Ambassadors Primary School Project aims to gather the views of primary school pupils in Scotland. We want to understand the experiences of children who are entitled to support at primary school, and to explore the similarities and differences of that experience with those in secondary school.

To gather this information, we’re doing some direct work with primary school pupils. As far as possible, we want this work to mirror the work we do with the Inclusion Ambassadors. This means we are:

• Working with primary schools in different parts of the country, because the Inclusion Ambassadors are from all across Scotland;
• Including children who have a range of additional support needs, just like the core Inclusion Ambassadors group; and
• Focusing on topics that the Inclusion Ambassadors talk about a lot, such as learning environments and relationships.

This month, we visited our first school for our first in-person sessions. Over three days, we worked with 11 pupils at Buchanhaven School in Aberdeenshire, gathering their views about school. The days were filled with fun icebreakers, play-based activities, and lots of fantastic conversations. There were felt-tip pens, stickers, and Lego in abundance!

Our visit utilized our experiences working with our secondary school Inclusion Ambassadors, adapting our practice to suit a younger age group. Using our tried and tested approach, informed by Children in Scotland’s Principles and Guidelines to Meaningful Participation and Engagement, we designed our sessions to include significant time for relationship building, lots of play-based exploration, and made sure to offer choices – so that every child could engage in ways that worked for them.

We came away from the visit with a pile of notes and a collection of wonderful drawings, too. We’re still in the process of collating and exploring all that we have gathered, because there is so much of it! 

That said, there were some clear takeaways from our visit. The children had a real understanding of what support at school can look like. They could talk in detail about the value of different spaces at school, the importance of relationships with staff, and the impact of listening to children’s views. As one pupil put it, “if [children] are not listened to, they can be very sad”.

Buchanhaven School won the 2025 Success Looks Different Award in the Primary School category.

The biggest takeaway from our visit was that, as we suspected, primary school children have just as much to say about their learning and support as older pupils do!

Creating opportunities to listen to the views and ideas of pupils can help us understand what it means to be a primary school pupil in Scotland. We’re excited that this project will provide a space for some of these voices to be heard, and especially that this will include pupils with a range of additional needs.

We hope that the project will also inspire others to engage more directly with the voices of younger children. This is the aim of our two final outcomes: a resource for professionals which sets out the key ideas and experiences of the pupils we worked with, and a separate evaluative report about the impact of engaging with primary school pupils using the Inclusion Ambassadors approach.

We’re still right in the middle of the project, with another primary school visit set for the new year. So far, it’s been a wonderful opportunity to hear from younger pupils about their experiences of school and what support can look like. We can’t wait to see what else we will learn as the project continues – what we do know is, primary school pupils have a lot to say!