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Scotland ran the experiment we keep being offered

Elaine
6 days ago
4 min read

Autism Strategy Watch, 10 October 2026 · Elaine Walsh

Ireland does not have a national autism strategy. I write that line most days, and most days somebody tells me we do. We do not. The Autism Innovation Strategy published in 2024 was an eighteen-month, non-statutory programme of actions. It was not a national strategy, it was not a law, and nothing in it could be enforced by a parent at a kitchen table or a school at a planning meeting. The campaign for a statutory strategy continues, and in the meantime the system runs on goodwill, individual appeals and whoever happens to be shouting loudest that month.

Which is why this week in Scotland is worth your attention. Scotland did not fail to write a strategy. Scotland got further than we have, and then stopped short — and in stopping short it has shown us, in public, exactly what the stopping looks like.

Scotland

On Wednesday 7 October, the Minister for Mental Wellbeing, Maree Todd, made a statement to the Scottish Parliament setting out what comes after the Learning Disabilities, Autism and Neurodivergence Bill. The LDAN Bill was shelved when the Programme for Government was published in September. Todd said the decision “was not taken lightly”, and that an alternative approach to legislation would deliver “immediate action”. “We need to see change right here and right now,” she said. “We therefore need to reassess our approach.”

What arrives instead: a draft adult neurodevelopmental route map, to be published “in the autumn”, with no date given. It will set out a four-tier model — public health, universal, targeted and intensive support — based on Royal College of Psychiatrists recommendations. And an additional £600,000 to improve support for autistic adults, including help for people while they wait for assessment.

The opposition was not persuaded. Joe Long of Scottish Labour spoke of “waiting five years for a promised bill that never arrived”. Miles Briggs of the Scottish Conservatives said: “I think the Government has got this wrong.”

I want to be fair to the minister. “Immediate” is a real argument. A bill takes years; a route map can be published in months. Families waiting now do not eat legislation. But notice what has quietly changed hands. A duty you can enforce has become a document you can read. A timeline has become “the autumn”. And the money has landed at the point of waiting rather than at the point of need — which is generous to the queue and silent about why the queue exists.

Here is the part that should matter most to us. A route map can be excellent and still be withdrawn by the next minister without anyone having to repeal a single thing. That is the whole difference a statute makes. It is not paperwork. It is the difference between a promise and a floor.

England

Nothing new this week. England’s position is unchanged and worth restating because it is the other half of the same lesson: the 2021–2026 strategy was drafted to apply until July 2026, and the Government’s stated position is that it remains in effect until a revised strategy is published. In a written answer on 28 April 2026, the Government said it was “carefully considering our approach” and would “set out a position in due course”. A strategy that has run past its own end date, held open by a sentence, is not a strategy with teeth either.

Ireland

And at home, the absence showed up this week in the most ordinary way possible. The Department of Education wrote to schools on 8 October about preparing parents for strike action, with almost all schools likely to close on Wednesday 14 October and again on Wednesday 21 October. Read the coverage and you will find no line about special schools, special classes, or the children whose school week has already been shortened for want of staff.

That is not an oversight by a journalist. It is what no statutory floor feels like from the inside. When closures are planned, somebody has to ask who needs a plan rather than a letter — and when nothing obliges anyone to ask, the asking falls to parents. A closure day is not the same event in every house. For a child who needs the same room, the same adult and the same order of things, two unscheduled Wednesdays are not a day off. They are a week with a hole in it.

New evidence on the benefits of a strategy

Nothing new published this week that I can stand over.

What this tells Ireland

Scotland has just run the experiment we keep being offered: act now, legislate later, trust the plan. We should watch it honestly rather than smugly, because we are not ahead. We have no bill to shelve. But we should also be clear-eyed about what we are being sold whenever somebody points at a programme of actions and calls it a strategy. Ask of any promise: who can enforce this, and against whom? If the answer is nobody, it is a plan, and plans leave when their authors do.

Change the environment, not the child — and write the change down somewhere a parent can hold you to it.

Autism Strategy Watch is a daily record of what countries with a national autism strategy are doing, and what Ireland is doing without one.

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