Special education is usually defined as provisions made for children on the basis of particular and atypical physical or behavioural characteristics they have or manifest. Most current and widely used special education textbooks adopt such a definition, and Havill and Mitchell’s (1972) book — so far the only general New Zealand reference book in this area, is no exception: ‘Special education refers to the facilities, materials and teaching resources provided for children who because of exceptional physical, intellectual, emotional or social characteristics, can not receive maximum benefit from a regular school programme (Havill & Mitchell, 1972 [p.9])’; ‘….provisions brought to bear for children whose teaching needs are beyond the resources usually available in an ordinary school (Ross, 1972 [p. 17]). There is nothing wrong with defining special education in this way. Indeed the fact that a number of children have or show exceptional physical or behavioural characteristics (or can be reliably predicted to do so) is the very foundation upon which special educational provisions are planned and made. What needs equal recognition, however — and is frequently overlooked, is that such provisions will be necessary to the degree that regular classroom provisions are inadequate to accommodate children with special needs. It is possible — indeed probable, that many children are receiving special educational provisions mostly because of the inadequacies of their particular school/classroom situation and not primarily because of any special teaching needs they may have. In this sense, special educational services can be viewed as a type of “Band-Aid” facility — available when regular class provisions are inadequate for particular children because of inadequacies on the part of the teacher (i.e., in teaching ability, understanding of the special needs and learning/behavioural characteristics of the children concerned, etc.) or inadequacies in resources available to the teacher (i.e., equipment, time, etc.). The fact that it is very difficult to ascertain in any particluar case whether a child is receiving special education primarily because of characteristics he/she has or primarily because of characteristics or resources his/her teacher does not have, makes it very difficult to specify the special educational needs of such children, or to design or evaluate special educational provisions vis-a-vis the needs of the children concerned.

New Zealand is actually bigger in land size than Britain but has only three million people. Outside the main centres the population is spread thinly over a relatively large area. The largest city is Auckland (Population close to 1 million people), my own city, Christchurch, has only 300,000 people. The problem in deaf education is fundamentally one of ensuring that every child, regardless of geographical location, is provided with the best possible help in all areas of development. This article represents my interpretation of how we attempted this in the past, what we are doing at the moment and what we might develop in the future.

While New Zealand has a long history of providing special classes for the educationally handicapped, (Havill & Mitchell 1972) substantial specialized training programmes at a post-graduate level for teachers of these classes are a comparatively recent development. Apart from well-established courses for speech therapists and teachers of the deaf, the first systematic attempt to develop specialized training programmes for teachers in Special Education in New Zealand was the establishment in 1974 of a one-year post-graduate course for teachers of the Educationally Handicapped at Christchurch Teachers College.

Baseline observations indicated that little peer imitation took place by a 3 year old Downs Syndrome boy integrated into a local kindergarten. The imitation of more developmentally advanced children is generally presumed to be an important benefit to be derived from integration, and the purpose of the present study was to teach peer imitation, through the use of contingent verbal reinforcement for appropriate peer imitation. A multiple-baseline across the three different classes of behaviour, was used to measure the number of imitations (probes) out of a possible five that occurred when they were modelled by the experimenter at the end of the Peer-Imitation Training sessions. The number of probes imitated, increased rapidly for block play, once reinforcement was introduced during the Peer Training sessions on day 3. After day 5, the number increased in both sand and dough play as well, and generalisation occurred. The high, stable rate of peer imitation responses in such a short amount of time by a retarded child indicates the usefulness of this approach as a tool to aid integration.

The late 1970’s have, in Queensland, seen an increasing number of exceptional children being integrated into regular school settings. In some cases attempts at integration have failed miserably. The present survey was conducted in the first half of 1979. It is an attempt to collect information in order to improve the integration of physically handicapped children into alternative school placements, in particular regular classroom settings. The information collected through the survey forms a basis of a sequence of integration procedures for physically handicapped children. The strategies contained in the sequence, while focusing on the physically handicapped, could be appropriate for other children with special needs.