It is axiomatic that people with intellectual disabilities have the same human and civil rights to education as other citizens and that they must therefore have the same opportunities to attend their local schools and educational facilities. This is a fine vision. But it is far from the reality experienced by the majority of people with intellectual disabilities across the world.

No country in the world has reason to be satisfied with the quality of the educational facilities which it provides for people with intellectual disabilities. But enough examples of good practice exist in different countries to make it possible for all of us to reappraise ways in which a higher quality of inclusive education and schooling could be provided for people with intellectual disabilities and the contribution that we can make personally and professionally to that process.

In the field of intellectual disabilities, we need to define education in very broad terms as anything which systematically promotes learning and development. Defined in this way, education is a lifelong process which neither begins nor ends with schooling. Similarly, it is carried out by many people who are not teachers. Parents are at the heart of this process from the outset. The years spent at school are clearly of vital importance but they are only one element of the educational process. There is a sense in which all work with people with intellectual disabilities is educational, whatever the setting, in so far as it helps them to learn and to develop knowledge, skills and understanding.

Education authorities throughout the world are striving to implement the principles of inclusive education. The Malaysian Ministry of Education has adopted these principles and is presently involved in translating them into practice. As part of this program, three teachers college lecturers and an officer of the Teacher Education Division undertook an intensive short-term training course at Flinders University in South Australia. The aim of this project was to devise a course in Inclusive Education that would be taught to trainee teachers in colleges throughout Malaysia. This keynote address describes the collaborative efforts of the Malaysian and Australian lecturers who developed the course and the experiences of one of these lecturers who has introduced the course into the curriculum of the Sarawak Teachers College. There are many lessons to be learned by examining how different countries attempt to solve similar problems. A number of these lessons are explored in this address.

I am honoured by your invitation to present a Keynote Address at the 19th National Conference of the Australian Association of Special Education, and particularly pleased to have the opportunity to return to Darwin. I last visited here in 1990, to attend the UNESCO South East Asia and South Pacific Sub-Regional Conference “Education for All”. In 1991 I left Australia to undertake an AIDAB (now known as AusAID), project in the South Pacific region. So I have had the opportunity to view at first hand the progress that has been made towards the UNESCO goal of “Education for AH”, in a number of Pacific countries, during the past four years.

It is a great privilege to give this lecture in memory of Len Cosson who was a colleague and a close personal friend. Life is full of ironies because those of you who remember Len’s teaching methods will know that he thought lectures were a total waste of time. However I think he would enjoy this occasion on two counts. Firstly he would appreciate the tribute and secondly, knowing his sense of humour he would enjoy enormously the spectacle of me struggling to turn a lecture into an educational experience. The theme of this lecture will be “Learning from George the Third’s Physicians or Minding is not Good Enough”.

Although support for the integration of students with disabilities has increased in the past 20 years in Australia, it has not been clear to what extent this support has resulted in less restrictive educational placements for these students. This paper reports the results of an analysis of trends in the placement of students with disabilities in Australian schools. The paper also discusses the influence on this educational placement by sex, age and number of disabilities of school students, and their State of residence. This discussion follows the analysis of portions of a national data set compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics that related to people with disabilities.

Hearing parents of young children newly diagnosed with a hearing loss typically know little of this condition or how it can best be managed. Information and assistance is available through early intervention programs. However, these take a variety of forms and offer different, sometimes conflicting, philosophies. The selection of an early intervention program is an important choice and one which requires parents to collect and assimilate large amounts of information and opinion. This must be done during what is, for most, a highly traumatic period. It is generally accepted that parents should make the major choices for themselves and their children, rather than have them made for them by experts, but that this should be done in a collaborative manner. This requires that the relevant experts are able and willing to provide information and advice which is balanced, comprehensible, and appropriate to the needs and abilities of the parents - that is, information and advice which is helpful. This study surveyed parents who had been through the early intervention process to identify the sources from which they obtained their information, and their perceptions of the helpfulness of the information provided.