Who is accountable for the education of children with special needs? We can begin to find out by considering these additional questions:

How can the school improve its approach to teaching handicapped children?

What kinds of help can parents be expected to provide?

How important is the influence of nonhandicapped peers and what role is best for them?

What kinds of curriculum should the public favor in order to achieve integration?

In what ways can the government offer effective leadership and support?

When we pose these more specific concerns, some useful changes take place in our point of view. There is a shift in emphasis from who is at fault to who can be helpful, from limitations to possibilities. The resulting perspective identifies other people with whom we must work more closely in order for children to succeed.

During recent years educators have made it a practice to specify the learnings for which they are willing to be held accountable. This policy is worthwhile but insufficient. I believe that we need a more inclusive definition of accountability, one that will acknowledge and clarify the different roles and obligations for those who teach elsewhere than the classroom or whose influence on child development is indirect. Surely the helping environment for educating children with special needs must include the collaborative efforts of school faculty, parents, students and the government. Let’s consider how each of these parties are implicated in the concept of shared accountability.

The opportunity to participate in this conference is a welcome one. It is an honour to be invited to give a lecture which commemorates the work of an outstanding educator, Des English. To have the needs of special education brought directly to the attention of the Curriculum Development Centre in this way is timely and may well give a focus and an impetus to our thus far modest efforts in this direction. It is noteworthy that the conference has provided for a number of curriculum workshops in which particular dimensions of needs can be addressed. It is important that in those workshops specific needs are related systematically to overall curriculum design and development questions. There is added reason for this in the criticism within special education of the historic tendency to define and categorise qualities and conditions of need according to narrow or highly particularised criteria instead of setting curriculum tasks within a broad framework of aims and a wide and open definition of learning situations. This is perfectly understandable in view of the history of special education and the fact that we are concerned with a particular dimension and aspects of learning. There are institutional constraints, too, which are acknowledged in the Warnock Committee’s statement:

Today there are approximately three million children in Australian schools. Of these 35,268 are in full time special classes or special schools. A further 21,194 are receiving special education help through part-time special classes, while an additional 2,569 are receiving help through consultative visiting teacher services (Table 9, 20, Australian Students and their Schools, 1979). On those figures 1.96 per cent of our school population are receiving special education services. As can be seen from Table 1 the number of children receiving special education varies from .99 percent of the school population in the Australian Capital Territory to 6.02 percent in the Northern Territory.

It is well known that the ways in which we perceive reality are selective.

It is well known that the ways in which parents and professionals perceive the services that are provided for children with special needs are also selective. Such selectivities of parents or professionals may be shaped by their current experience, by their past learning or by the transmitted value system of families or in some instances neighbourhood communities or, of course, the value system of professional groups and subgroups.

This paper, ‘On Being Infomed’, is about how a sample of 60 families from the A.C.T. and N.S.W. and W.A. with a wide range of children with special needs view current services. It is concerned with identifying the factors that parents believe might contribute to change. It is about parents perspective of services and the changes that they hope for in our schools, in departments of health and welfare and indeed changes that they hope might occur in both Government attitudes and policy. These parents views have been obtained by both responses to questionnaires and by individual interviews.

Over the past decade there has been in evidence a steadily growing awareness of the many children in our schools experiencing difficulties in school mathematics achievement. Recent public emphasis on educational accountability’ and the associated ‘back to basics’ debate has certainly contributed to the growing concern with those failing to learn elementary mathematics.

In considering the manner in which our educational institutions are responding to the needs of such children, it needs to be stated at the outset, that the situation is confused by a lack of agreement as to what skills are ‘basic’ in the first place. If those children deemed to be in need of ‘remediation’ in mathematics, are to be well served, much more attention will need to be given to an analysis of what is ‘basic’ for them. At present, the view still prevails which restricts basic mathematics content to arithmetic, and in particular, it emphasises mechanistic skills in paper and pencil computation. It seems unlikely that any future employers will only require their workers to carry out mechanistic computational skills, yet pleas are still heard that this ought to constitute the main mathematical diet of those in remedial mathematics classes. It is often assumed that until these skills have been mastered no other worthwhile mathematics can be attempted. The current president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (N.C.T.M.), Shirley Hill (Newsletter, 1979) refers to this assumption as the ‘prerequisite fallacy’. This belief is manifested in schools where remedial children are kept in groups until a minimal level of competency is reached in the usual mechanistic skills. This means that many children never have an introduction to challenging and interesting mathematical problem solving at their own level. Insufficient recognition is given to the fact that much of this kind of valuable work can be given to children without prior complete skill mastery. Current practices too often, only disadvantage the slow learner even more, as the mechanical performance skills are the ones which will be least required of employees and citizens in the future.

It is interesting to speculate on the concept of decision-making and change in education. A particularly appropriate trend in education which is worthy of careful scrutiny is the concept of ‘mainstreaming’ – a topic of current concern to educators and one which will be mentioned many times, no doubt, during this Conference. Of special concern in this paper is the question of the mainstreaming of hearing impaired children and the attitudes of the non-handicapped peers to the inclusion of deaf children in their class. As a brief preamble to the particular study under question, let us consider the multi-faceted nature of mainstreaming, together with some of the decisions which have to be made about this trend. Reynolds (1976) suggests that mainstreaming is ‘an enlargement of the stream of regular education … to accommodate children who present special needs.’ Clearly, mainstreaming is part of the wider trend of ‘normalization’. In his landmark book, The Futures of Children, Hobbs (1975) says that normalization implies that the handicapped person should be kept as close as possible to his natural setting and that the normal socializing agencies, the family, school and neighbourhood, should be used, rather than special agencies.