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On Being Informed – Parent Attitudes to Services for Children with Special Needs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2016

Roger Rees*
Affiliation:
Canberra College of Advanced Education

Extract

It is well known that the ways in which we perceive reality are selective.

It is well known that the ways in which parents and professionals perceive the services that are provided for children with special needs are also selective. Such selectivities of parents or professionals may be shaped by their current experience, by their past learning or by the transmitted value system of families or in some instances neighbourhood communities or, of course, the value system of professional groups and subgroups.

This paper, ‘On Being Infomed’, is about how a sample of 60 families from the A.C.T. and N.S.W. and W.A. with a wide range of children with special needs view current services. It is concerned with identifying the factors that parents believe might contribute to change. It is about parents perspective of services and the changes that they hope for in our schools, in departments of health and welfare and indeed changes that they hope might occur in both Government attitudes and policy. These parents views have been obtained by both responses to questionnaires and by individual interviews.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Australian Association of Special Education 1980

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