Special educational needs : report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People.

  • Great Britain. Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People.
Date:
1978
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Special educational needs : report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    32/436 (page 16)
    schools and classes and the placement of pupils. It used these prophetic words: “We do not however contemplate that these [special] schools would exist with a different legal sanction, under a different system of nomenclature and under different administrative provisions. If the majority of children for whom these schools... are intended are, ex hypothesi, to lead the lives of ordinary citizens, with no shadow of a ‘certificate’ and all that that implies to handicap their careers, the schools must be brought into closer relation with the Public Elemen- tary School System and presented to parents not as something both distinct and humiliating, but as a helpful variation of the ordinary school”. 2.31 This view of special education as a variant of ordinary education had been expressed in relation to the feeble-minded only. But the Committee had, consciously or not, advanced a principle extending to all forms of disability; and also to all degrees of disability, because if no clear distinction could be drawn between feeble-mindedness and backwardness the same must also be true of feeble-mindedness and imbecility. However, forty years were to pass before the right of mentally handicapped children to education was recognised without qualification. 2.32 In contrast to the education of the physically and mentally handicapped that of BLIND and DEAF children had made substantial advances by the turn of the century. Provision for their education had been a statutory duty of the school authorities since 1893 and by 1902 most of the children were receiving education, either in maintained schools or in voluntary schools or institutions, and education was free to those children whose parents could not afford to contribute towards the cost. There were however three areas of deficiency. Their education was entirely neglected before they became of school age; moreover the statutory education of deaf children did not begin until the age of seven and even the blind were not in practice always able to gain admission to voluntary schools at five. Secondly, children with partial sight or partial hearing were at a dis- advantage in ordinary schools, and even in special schools their usable sensory faculties were insufficiently exploited. Thirdly, whilst Worcester College provided an academic education for boys, there was no comparable provision for girls. 2.33 Nursery education for blind children originated in 1918 when the Royal National Institute for the Blind opened the first of its residential Sunshine Homes for deprived blind children. In 1921 the Institute also founded Chorley- wood College as a secondary school for blind girls. The first provision for partially sighted children was made by the London County Council in 1907, when myopic children in the Authority’s blind schools were taught reading and writing from large type instead of braille. The following year the Council estab- lished a special higher class for myopic children, which combined special instruction with attendance at ordinary classes for oral teaching. By 1913 eight English authorities were making provision for the partially sighted. Reporting in 1934 the Board of Education Committee of Inquiry into Problems relating to Partially Sighted Children recommended that so far as possible these children should be educated in classes within ordinary schools and should not be taught alongside the blind. The Committee had found that provision for 2,000 partially _ sighted children was being made in 37 schools and that a further 18 schools for