anbuend wrote in reply to my previous comment:
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I have a friend who went to Catholic school in the fifties or sixties, and she said that, at least in her area, lots of disabled kids went to the school right along with non-disabled kids and it wasn't even barely remarked upon. [...]
I only went to Catholic preschool, and an extremely unusual one at that, so I don't have as much experience with it to know whether that's a widespread thing or not. Do you know whether it is?
The Handicapped Pupils and Medical Services Regulations for England and Wales (1945) defined the categories of pupils with a physical and mental handicap for whom local education authorities were required to provide special educational treatment as follows:
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(a) Blind pupils.
(b) Partially sighted pupils.
(c) Deaf pupils.
(d) Partially deaf pupils.
(e) Delicate pupils. Pupils who by reason of impaired physical condition cannot, without risk to their health, be educated under the normal regime of an ordinary school.
(f) Diabetic pupils.
(g) Educationally Sub-Normal pupils. Pupils who, by reason of limited ability or other conditions resulting in educational retardation, require some specialized form of education wholly or partly in substitution for the education normally given in ordinary schools.
(h) Epileptic pupils.
(i) Maladjusted pupils. Pupils who show evidence of emotional instability or psychological disturbance and require special educational treatment in order to effect their personal, social or educational readjustment.
(j) Physically handicapped pupils.
(k) Pupils suffering from Speech Defect. Pupils who on account of stammering, aphasia, or defect of voice or articulation not due to deafness, require educational treatment.
Unless the Minister [of Education] otherwise determines in the case of any particular pupil, every pupil who is blind, deaf, physically handicapped, epileptic, or aphaisic must be educated in a special school. Blind or epileptic pupils must be educated in boarding schools. Pupils in other categories may be educated in an ordinary school if satisfactory special educational treatment is provided.
Peggy Everard in her book
Involuntary Stranger about her autistic son David (born in 1952) writes that:
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Autistic children were accepted for education under 'maladjustment' and were sometimes sent to schools for maladjusted children as now and again local authorities took the label rather too literally.
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The first school for autistic children in the UK opened in 1965.
From the 1960s onwards there was a growing movement in favour of integrated schooling for disabled children in Britain. The
Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People under the chairmanship of Mary Warnock [the Warnock Report], published in 1978, gave cautious approval to the movement for integrated education.
The Report wrote in respect of autistic children:
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At this early stage in our understanding of the complex educational needs of children with [autism], it is difficult to know how important it is for such children to be educated separately, though research has established the importance of appropriate educational methods.
The Education Act 1981 required the education of all children in mainstream schools, but subject to parental wishes and the efficient provision of education for children with special needs.
In the last few years there has been controversy in the UK about the closure of special schools for autistic children, with parents of such children campaigning to keep them open. Generally middle-class parents are able to have their autistic children educated in special schools, if that is what they want.
When I was at high school in the early sixties there was one boy who may have been autistic.
An older female cousin who was mildly epileptic went to mainstream schools.
I don't remember if a mentally ret*d boy, whose parents were acquaintances of my parents, went to mainstream or special school.
11 May 2008, 9:26 pm
