For learners with special educational needs (SEN) an area of particular challenge occurs frequently during transition times. There are a range of inter- and intra-school periods when major changeovers are required. Preparing to enter school, moving from primary to secondary schooling, and leaving school into postschool options are all very demanding times, especially for youngsters who have difficulty with changing routines. Moving between activities, subjects, teachers, classrooms, and year groups are also very demanding tasks for some students. This special issue of the Australasian Journal of Special Education includes a series of papers that consider aspects of school transitions for learners with SEN. The papers address transitions between primary and secondary schools and into postschool options focusing on research and innovations for providing positive learning outcomes for learners with disabilities, learning difficulties, or with autism spectrum disorder from across the Asia-Pacific region.

Case-based teaching is one way of responding to the challenge of preparing general and special education teachers for the roles they are to assume. We discuss the rationale for case-based instruction and described our efforts to use this approach in teaching a course in behaviour management. Our impression is that although case-based instruction is a promising approach, it has limitations in teacher preparation. It is promising in that it gives voice to teachers’ practical knowledge and helps students become more reflective about teaching practice. It appears to be particularly limited as an approach with trainees who have no prior classroom experience, and it is no substitute for a working knowledge of basic principles.

New Zealand has much of real quality to be proud of in special education. On numerous international surveys of education, New Zealand schools continue to rank highly - especially with respect to reading and written language, and were such surveys to focus on special educational matters, my guess is that the picture would be equally positive. There are very real difficulties in developing special educational provisions for a country with New Zealand’s geographical characteristics. New Zealand has a relatively small total population, which is scattered widely across a rather large and geographically well separated area, and these factors make for real problems in providing for children with difficulties which occur infrequently - as do most conditions associated with exceptionality and special education.

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.

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 purpose of this presentation is to trace the development of early educational intervention in the United States as a means to prevent intellectual and social retardation. It is meant primarily to summarize the value and effects of such programs and to urge their continued use and development as a primary prevention strategy and a valuable treatment approach to assist children at risk and to encourage families to seek services for handicapped children at the earliest age.

Parents of 1003 children with moderate or severe intellectual disability attending state schools in New South Wales responded to a survey about provision of services from the time of suspicion or identification of their child’s disability. The survey sought to obtain information about the types of services the parents were offered, the services they used and were still using, and the extent to which they found the services beneficial. Another aim was to see if there were differences between responses of parents of older and younger children which might suggest changes over time or for children of different ages. Parents of younger children were more likely to have received helpful information and to have been referred to support services. Some children were found to be receiving up to eight separate services, while others were receiving nil. Special schools were rated as very useful by the highest number of parents, with parents of younger children showing a slight preference for an integrated placement. Work-related training or activity was mentioned by more than half of the parents as being required in their child’s future.

This review integrates and evaluates research conducted on possible contributing factors to peer relationship problems of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD). Substantial evidence suggests that children with AD/HD have serious problems in multiple aspects of their relationships with peers. Difficulties resulting from inattention, impulsivity, and over activity negatively affect these children's performance in the peer group and as a result, children with the disorder are often rated as less popular and more rejected by their non-AD/HD peers. This article critically reviews risk factors for peer relationship problems of children with AD/HD including family, school, and child-specific factors. The implications of AD/HD research are examined with an emphasis on developing an ecological perspective to addressing the peer relationship problems of children with the disorder.

Reasonable adjustments are measures and actions that have been adopted in Australia to assist students with disability to participate in their learning on the same basis as their peers in a way that is free of inequality and exclusion. However, little research explores the enablers and barriers associated with implementing reasonable adjustments to support student learning. Therefore, research-based guidance regarding how best to direct the successful implementation of reasonable adjustments is required. This scoping review of 25 studies found a limited body of research that suggested reasonable adjustments are an effective means to address learner diversity; however, several barriers exist in teacher and school attitudes towards making adjustments, as well as how policy of reasonable adjustments can be systematically applied. A model of best practice summarises a strategy to address these significant themes.

Alternate assessment and access to the general curriculum are the focus of much attention today for professionals and practitioners who provide services to students who have severe disabilities. Current legislation in the United States requires states to include students with severe disabilities in state‐wide assessments. The rationale is to require schools to be accountable for the progress of all students. Including students with severe disabilities in school accountability systems has created the need to rethink curriculum for this population and develop alternate assessments. In recent decades educators have focused on functional curriculum for students with severe disabilities, but recent federal legislation in the United States called No Child Left Behind requires schools to collect data on the yearly progress in academic content areas. Educators are focusing on ways to define alternate achievement standards for reading and mathematics for students with severe disabilities. States have developed a variety of formats for alternate assessments to be used for students who cannot participate in large scale assessments with accommodations. This article describes: (a) how the move towards including all students in school accountability is impacting curriculum for students with severe disabilities, (b) the decisions states must make in developing alternate assessments, and (c) recommendations for future practice and research.

Many children with hearing loss have atypical social communication skills despite having age-appropriate speech and language. Graduate assessments in an early intervention program for children with hearing loss indicated that despite achieving language skills within typical limits for over a decade, social skills development was frequently delayed. Data gathered in 2007 and 2012 indicated the majority of children with hearing loss demonstrated poor acquisition of concepts linked to theory of mind (ToM), achieving either delayed or alternative acquisition patterns. A small-group 8-week social skills intervention program was subsequently implemented for graduating cohorts with the aim of developing and improving social interactions. In 2017, measures of ToM were collected for 15 children with hearing loss aged 4–6 years and compared to ToM 2007 and 2012 cohort data. An additional measure of social understanding and flexibility, a persuasion task, was also implemented. Although ToM skills for the majority of the 2017 cohort were found to be on par with hearing peers, and were better than skills demonstrated by the 2007 and 2012 graduates, ability to successfully participate in a socially significant persuasion task with a peer was delayed. Challenges and solutions to the development of age-appropriate social skills are proposed.

Inclusive education is enshrined in law and supported by the literature as best practice in education. Inclusive education has been shown to provide better academic, social and behavioural outcomes for children with disabilities than segregated learning environments. In the Northern Territory, Australia, however, the dual system of mainstream and special education persists and so too does segregation and exclusion. The Northern Territory education strategy commits to strengthening inclusion and empowering families in educational decision-making by listening to their voices. In this paper, we highlight some of these voices, examining the experiences and perspectives of caregivers of children with disabilities as they participate in education in the Northern Territory. Caregivers’ experiences were coded into categories of inclusion and exclusion. Those that were not clearly inclusion nor exclusion were identified and the theme of non-inclusion was created. Non-inclusion was analysed thematically and is discussed as a nebulous space that exists for caregivers, presenting significant challenges that threaten their child’s inclusion at school as they navigate this dual system. If Australian education systems are to provide genuine inclusive education, we need to understand the experiences of caregivers better so we can remediate the issues creating non-inclusion for children with disabilities and caregivers.

In the abovementioned article by Sng, Carter, & Stephenson, Figure 2 is incorrect. The phase change line from ‘Baseline’ to the ‘Intervention’ is cropped and in the wrong place. These two errors may mislead readers of the article.

The term instructional technology’ refers to two relatively distinct classes of phenomena which have been described by Saettler (1968) as “the physical science concept” — the application of physical science and engineering technology (movie projectors, television, teaching machines, computers, etc.) to the presentation of instructional materials, and “the behavioural science concept” — the application of behavioural science (especially psychology and sociology) to problems of learning and instruction. While both of these classes of phenomena clearly have considerable potential for improving the content and conduct of education — including special education, it is the writer’s belief that the extent to which “the physical science concept” can be effectively utilised in education/special education will be limited — indeed constrained by the current spate of knowledge which has been derived from “the behavioural science concept”. The present paper reflects this belief and is thus primarily concerned with “the behavioural science concept” — in particular with the application of psychology and sociology to problems of learning and instruction in special education.

An initial clarification of the term “special education” also seems necessary. Following Kirk and Gallagher (1979), the term “special education” in the present paper will refer to those aspects of education required for handicapped or gifted children which are “unique and/or in addition to the instructional programme for all children [p. 13]” ‘Handicapped or gifted children’ being those who “deviate from the average or normal child (1) in mental characteristics, (2) in sensory abilities, (3) in neuro-motor or physical characteristics, (4) in social behaviour, (5) in communication abilities, or (6) in multiple handicap … to such an extent that modifications of school practices, or special educational services are required for the children to develop to maximum capacity” (Kirk & Gallagher, 1979 [p. 3].)

Children with behaviour disorders have long been regarded as the most difficult group of children with special needs to integrate into the regular classroom. Despite the difficulty Government policy continues to advocate integration for all children with special needs. The present study examines the placement of children with behaviour disorders in regular schools one and two years after an initial study on their integration was undertaken. The results indicate that many of these children are no longer at the surveyed school. The results would suggest that the regular classroom/school may not be the optimal learning environment for all children with behaviour disorders.

The ability to generate narratives is important for literacy development. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been found to generate less complex narratives than typically developing peers. This pilot AB study was designed to investigate the efficacy of a brief intervention procedure to develop the macrostructure of original fictional narratives based on a realistic scenario in one child, aged 9 years 8 months, with autism spectrum disorder and language disorder. The intervention targeted the characters, setting, problem, feelings, and fix of fictional narrative. Intervention involved the use of macrostructure icons, pictures to support the generation of narratives, clinician modelling, and the participant telling the entire narrative each session. The participant received 12 training sessions of 4–6 minutes each and the intervention was effective. Areas for future research include implementation of a stronger research design and investigation of generalisation to fantasy-based fictional narratives.

Dempsey (this issue) has provided a commentary on our study (Carter, Stephenson, & Strnadová, 2011) examining the reported rates of use of instructional practices by Australian special educators. Examining this commentary, it is evident that on many issues we are on the same page and agree on many of the fundamental conclusions to be drawn from the study. Nevertheless, Dempsey did express concern regarding several aspects of the reporting of the study, which were suggested to have the ‘potential to mislead’ readers. In essence, these criticisms revolve around four substantive points and these will each be addressed.