It is a deep honor for me to be invited to Australia. When I received the invitation, I faced a very ambivalent situation. I had resolved to bring my life into some form of sanity and to reduce the amount of traveling that I was doing; but to receive an invitation to Australia, even though I had been here three times before, was to me an opportunity that I could not pass. Australia is a beautiful country and contains a beautiful people, and I thank you for inviting me.

My subject is “Curriculum for the Intellectually Handicapped,” and in an hour and one-quarter there is no way in which I can possibly cover the range of handicapping conditions, requirements, and needs for such a curriculum. I have, however, selected some areas that I should like to discuss.

The view is put that the least restrictive environment and the most appropriate climate for intellectually handicapped adolescents and young adults can be found or created in Colleges of Technical and Further Education in New South Wales and indeed across Australia. Such provision may also be the most appropriate for other categories of handicap, disability or disadvantage.

There is still a tendency for the community at large to underestimate the potential of handicapped young people for development. Research, not generally well known and therefore not acted upon, shows that despite poor initial performance, many intellectually handicapped people show substantial improvement with learning.

The characteristics of computer-assisted instruction (CAI) which makes it so worthy of consideration for use by the teacher of pupils with special needs, whose time for individual attention with her pupils is limited, are briefly discussed, and comment is made about the limitations of this approach. Attention is drawn to the alternative approach of peer tutoring, where the desirable one-to-one characteristic is attainable, and where there is the possibility that the sensitivity to the quality of the computer program, which is one of the limitations of the approach of CAI, may be contrasted with the not-so-sensitive-to-quality-of-program characteristic of peer tutoring. This possibility is examined in the context of a sample of poor reading Year eight pupils who were given a period of peer tutoring by Year eleven and twelve pupils in the same school, where the demonstrably not high quality program consisted of relatively few meetings between tutor and tutee, of short duration, at which it was expected that there would be talk, reading and being read to. Use of a control group enabled the conclusions to be reached that this peer tutoring resulted in gains for the tutees in reading ability and in attitude towards and behaviour in school, this being suggestive of the power of this low staff input, low cost, low technology technique in the area of special education.

The author wishes to thank the dedicated coordinators Pam Kontaratos, Maria Movromattis, Diana Gizzi, Debbie Brown, and Lisa Whitbread who gave so much of their time and energy to the program. Special thanks go to Sandra Doyle, senior co-ordinator who competently undertook the major task of training all other co-ordinators in the exercise routines to a high level of competence.

An earlier article (Hallinan, 1984) introduced the important role of media in teacher education concerning children with special needs. This follow-up article briefly reviews some currently available media in Australia, on the topic of identification and assessment issues in special education.