There has been unrest in our newspapers recently about standards of literacy in schools. To those of us who daily are in touch with children who have difficulties in learning to read and write, periodic public forays into the standards issues are usually unhelpful, unwarranted and uninformed. Comparisons between the standards of literacy achieved by different generations of school children are difficult to make, on the one hand because our functional literacy requirements differ from yesterday’s and on the other because the conditions of learning and performance in schools have undergone immense change during the last couple of generations.

One of the most difficult tasks faced by the collective leadership of a nation is the design and maintenance of its schools. Leaders must decide what is to be taught, by whom, and who to teach. The membership of the teacher and the student groups, in turn, help determine how the subject matter is to be taught. The what, who, and how issues are further complicated by rapid changes in cultural values and priorities, political and economic issues and legal interpretations. These complications require strenuous policy discussions and often agonizing reappraisals as the nation’s political leaders interact with their constituents, including groups representing parents, educators, scientists and economists.

There have been some exciting changes in education during the late 70s and early 80s. Of particular significance has been the emphasis on the processes of learning rather than the lockstep, content-oriented curriculum. This has enabled special education teachers to develop a fresh view of children with learning difficulties, discarding notions of their deficits and instead monitoring their current development and learning strategies, and the personal and environmental constraints which operate to limit their learning potential. This approach concentrates on the whole child, establishing strengths, building confidence through success, developing risk-taking behaviours, teaching problemsolving strategies, and learning to become an independent learner.

It is now 18 years since Lloyd Dunn (1968) wrote his seminal paper “Special Education for the Mildly Retarded: Is much of it justified?” In the meantime, there has been major legislation in USA in the form of Public Law 94-142 (1975) which has been widely interpreted as a blueprint for improved services for the handicapped and for their integration into ordinary schools. In Britain, Section 10 of the Education Act (1976), the Warnock Report (1978) and the Education Act (1981) have provided, in varying degrees, official encouragement for integration.

The employment status and social adjustment of two groups of hearing-impaired young adults were compared with those of a group of normal hearing adults of comparable age. One of the hearing-impaired groups had graduated from units (special classes) in regular secondary schools. The rates of unemployment were similar for the hearing-impaired and normal hearing groups, but other intergroup differences in employment characteristics were apparent. In general, the social adjustment of the two groups of hearing-impaired groups was similar to that of the hearing group, although there were indications that the School for Deaf graduates had experienced more difficulty in coping following school graduation.

In recent years much interest has been expressed about the possibilities of teaching thinking skills to special education populations. Instrumental Enrichment (IE) is a programme designed to achieve significant modification in cognitive abilities in retarded adolescents (Feuerstein, Rand, Hoffman & Miller, 1980). The purpose of this paper is to attempt to review the major concepts and philosophy underlying IE, and consider the available research that has been published by way of evaluation of the programme.

This paper is a partial report of an investigation into the integration program at two A.C.T. special schools catering for moderately and severely intellectually handicapped children. Teachers and parents of the children at the special schools completed questionnaires concerning the conduct and outcomes of the program. The opinions of teachers at the regular schools were obtained by personal interview.

Overall there were positive attitudes expressed towards the program. Areas of concern include the level of support required for the regular class teacher, the level of preparation the handicapped children required before integration commenced, a worry of parents that handicapped children may be exposed to unnecessary pressures in the regular school system, and the fact that mere exposure of a handicapped child to a regular school environment may not lead to effective integration in the larger community.

The theme of the 11th National Conference of the Australian Association of Special Education was Responding to Expectations. Responding to expectations requires anticipation of correct educational directions and proper teaching strategies to accommodate such directions. All decisions that result from responding to expectations are fundamentally controversial and should be challenged. Through the process of challenge, expectations change, and this has been the case in the development of teaching strategies to improve communication for those who have a limited response repertoire.

Developments in curriculum content and method for severely handicapped students are reviewed as they have appeared in published literature over the last ten years. Curriculum content is presented from a normalisation perspective, referring to selected domains, criterion of ultimate functioning, environment, functional and age appropriate skills. The review of curriculum method indicates effective instructional skills to be maximising of instructional time, task analysis, data collection, applying levels of assistance, management of consequences, trial distribution, and generalisation. The implications of these developments are greatest for educational administrators who face changes in location of instruction, management of classes and level of skills needed for teachers of severely handicapped students.

How can we use computers effectively? This paper, which is intended for teachers already using computers in their classrooms, outlines and discusses three approaches to using and managing microcomputers with children who have special learning needs. The approaches describe computer-based classroom learning environments for children with a range of learning difficulties and are based on classroom work with children at D’Alton Special School, Hobart. Responses from some children working in these environments are also discussed.