Ladies and Gentlemen, It is an honour for me to open this National Conference. I have been most impressed by the detail and obvious depth of your agenda over the next 3½ days. I have also noted the eminence and experience of the people who will be speaking at the Conference.

By the end of this decade we may well look back on the beginning of the 1980’s as a watershed period in the provision of services for children with special needs in Australia. This period from 1979 to 1983 has been an era in which several state and national reports on needs in special education, teacher education and related areas have been published and placed before Federal and State governments for action. Yet, as fate would have it, this has been a period of great economic difficulty dominated by contractionary budgets at the Federal level with inevitable restraint at State levels. It has also been a period of record unemployment with the average person much more concerned about unemployment, family budgets and survival than social issues such as provision of appropriate and rightful resources to educate handicapped children and adults. Indeed, the visibility and relevance of education generally as a social and political issue has been subjugated by more pressing survival issues.

The need for capable, dedicated, and well trained teachers in special educational facilities for visually handicapped children is, and has always been crucial for the effective operation of those facilities. At the same time, the need for the above mentioned qualities in teachers of visually handicapped children has become more apparent in recent years, in the light of various changes which have occurred in the context of special educational services generally. These changes have also strongly affected the direction and scope of special educational research (Wedell & Roberts 1982).

The Makaton Vocabulary was devised by the author over ten years ago. It began as a small piece of work in response to a clinical need and is now extensively used all over the U.K. with children and adults who have communication and language difficulties.

Surveys carried out over the past five years (Reid, Jones & Kiernan) into the use of signing and symbols in schools for children who are mentally handicapped throughout the U.K. have shown the following growth of the scheme.

Several recent reviews of research on teaching and in particular research on teacher effectiveness have identified three variables: pupil engaged time, direct instruction and efficient classroom management as the most significant instructional factors related to pupil achievement (Barnes, 1981; Brophy, 1979, 1980; Good, 1979, 1982; and Rosenshine, 1976, 1979). While these findings, within the context of basic skill instruction, are unequivocal and now largely accepted within the educational community, their overemphasis to the virtual exclusion of other important classroom variables has led a number of researchers and teacher educators to express some concern (Griffin, Webb and Confrey, 1981; Roehler and Duffy, 1981).

In the United States, a certain percentage of the students cannot meet certain requirements of the school. A portion of these students (approximately 12% of the total school population) are identified as having some handicapping condition, i.e. deaf, blind, mentally retarded, learning disabled, emotionally disturbed, or orthopedically handicapped. Many of these identified students with mild to moderate handicaps are served in resource programs. When placed in a resource program, students also receive a portion of their academic instruction in a regular education classroom. Special education resource teachers support the regular program efforts by providing specific assessment of the students academic and social/emotional abilities, some direct instruction to the student, as well as consultation with regular classroom teachers, parents, and other specialists concerned with a student’s progress.

Ten Year 3 children from a Sydney primary school, identified by testing as the poorest readers out of the five classes in the grade, received remedial tutoring using a set of highly structured remedial materials. The tutoring involved twenty one volunteer mothers, and each mother worked with a child for two sessions a week to allow the child to receive four sessions of tutoring each week. The tutoring sessions involved (1) drill of single sounds and digraphs (2) tutoring and practice of word attack skills, and (3) reading practice using an appropriate reader, with verbal comprehension questions relevant to the reader. The volunteers kept records of each child’s performance during each session. After an average of one term of tutoring, the children demonstrated considerable improvement on test gains in comparison with gains made by a control group from the same classes.

What kind of legal scene will the special educator face in the 1990’s? It will be a scene whose genesis was in the bright idealism of the 1960’s. It will be marked by much greater accountability by the teaching profession for its mistakes and shortcomings than is possible under existing legal mechanisms. It will be marked by much greater public scrutiny and influence over educational policy making than is possible under the last vestiges of the Westminster system by which we are presently governed. It will be marked by greater use of the federal education funding power to achieve observance of human rights in the educational context, for both public and private sectors, than is at present politically possible. And it will be marked by the introduction of a wide range of external policing authorities, acting as watch dogs for students’ and parents’ human and legal rights.

Children who are classified as either emotionally disturbed or behavior disordered appear to stress school systems perhaps more intensely than any other handicapping condition. The behavioral characteristics of this population of students are extremely aversive to peers and adult social agents (teachers, parents) who must interact with them on a daily basis. Frequently, these children disrupt the instructional process for themselves and others, defy the teacher, and engage in forms of social behavior that are considered either inappropriate to the school setting (tantrumming, disturbing others, fighting) or are severe violations of social norms (stealing, self abuse).

Film and video play an important part in shaping our attitudes and increasing our understanding of children with special needs. Media of quality are now widely available in Australia, and the article discusses how this may be obtained by teachers. In this first of a series of occasional articles, media which introduces the field of special education are briefly reviewed in an annotated bibliography.

Art is for all human beings, including the handicapped. Visual Arts Education is able to provide an expressive form for communication, socialisation, creativity, self-expression, self-exploration and manipulation of the environment.

The Crossroads Special Education Task Group was formed in Queensland early in 1983 at the request of the Joint Board of Christian Education of Australia and New Zealand. Crossroads is an Australia wide, inter-church organisation which promotes the welfare of handicapped persons through:

• (a) regular club programs which have spirtual, recreational, educational and social aspects;

• (b) holiday activities under structured leadership and help from “enablers”;

• (c) special assistance to handicapped persons in church and Sunday school;

• (d) provision of religious education programsin State special schools;

• (e) chaplaincies to sheltered employment centres and institutions.