The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of decentralisation for Australian special education service delivery. Initiatives to decentralise educational service have become afocus of education policy both in Australia and overseas in recent years, although there has been little discussion of its effect on special education. This trend is examined from an Australian perspective. Problems associated with the provision of special education services are discussed in conjunction with an overview of the school based management of special education services.

Pull-out or withdrawal remedial instruction is the dominant service delivery model for regular class children with learning problems. The efficacy of this model has been in question for a number of years with claims that remedial instruction as delivered in such settings is neither special nor exemplary. The findings of the study reported here suggest these claims may be accurate, and they raise questions about both the training and deployment of resource/ remedial teachers.

In addressing the subject of resourcing special education programs in times of economic restraint, I want to say from the outset that I do not view the concept of “restraint” in a completely negative sense. In many ways it is in times of restraint that some of ourmostconstructiveand creative planning for effective service delivery occurs. It is at times such as these that we need to take a critical look at what we are doing in the area of program provision and to ask ourselves whether we are meeting needs and achieving outcomes, or whether, in fact, we could be doing better.

This study utilised a Direct Instruction methodology to test the efficacy of small group social skills training on the acquisition and generalisation of conversational skills of three moderately to severely intellectually impaired adolescents. The results indicated a general increase in the conversational behaviour of the participants over the course of the intervention and that for two of the participants these changes generalised to a new setting with new conversational partners.

Consider the following pattern of events in special education teaching. You have identified a four-step procedure that is important for the current topic you are working on with your students. The topic might be in a curriculum area like mathematics or in a behavioural area such as social skills. You devise and carry out a series of lessons on this topic and, after a suitable period of practice, you are pleased to observe that the steps in the procedure are used successfully by most of the group. The procedure is also used on the day following the original teaching, when you reinstate the training situation and conditions: Many of the students produce the procedure without prompting! The next day you test to see whether the students will use the procedure in a situation which involves a modification to the conditions you used in the original training. You might change the format of the mathematics problem or the social situation. For many of the students it seems as though your teaching in the use of the procedure never occurred. They act as though the procedure no longer exists. They do remember it when you remind them of the original training situation, but they don’t do that unless you provide the reminder. They have learned the procedure but they can’t transfer that learning.