The decision of the Australian Association of Special Education to sponsor a national study to investigate the effectiveness of Direct Instruction with mildly retarded children, is the climax of several years of burgeoning interest in and support for the approach. Initial advocacy of Direct Instruction was undertaken by Alex Maggs and his co-workers at Macquarie University (Bracey, et al 1975a, 1975b; Maggs and Morath, 1975, 1976a, 1976b; and Maggs and Moore, 1978). Today, proponents of the approach may be found in any number of schools, colleges and universities across the country.

The Australian Association of Special Education was inaugurated in late 1975 when representatives of State special education groups met and agreed to form a federation to pursue their aims at a national level. The Association has pursued its objectives through its constitutional and organizational structure since that time. On occasions, progress has been rapid and exciting in its scope and potential. By contrast, there have also been periods of consolidation, of hesitancy, and of frustration. Perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of AASE has been its inability to have its council delegates meet frequently enough to provide the basis for discussion at a level which assists consensus, and precipitates progress.

The effects that historical, philosophical and empirical factors have had upon the development of special education in Australia for children with learning disabilities/difficulties are examined. It is suggested that owing to the early neglect by the various education departments in providing effective services there has been a resultant dearth of professionally competent personnel to implement policies being formulated upon the emerging philosophies in special education. It is therefore argued that Australia requires an effective thrust into research at the classroom, the delivery and the teacher preparation levels so that the relatively diminishing resources for education may be better utilized for the child with a learning problem.

Using prompting and reinforcement procedures, two intellectually handicapped children in a parent oriented language teaching programme were taught to respond correctly to categories of locational prepositional requests. Training sessions for parents and daily parent teaching sessions for the children alternated with weekly probe sessions. During home teaching a child was taught to respond to one request and then, during probing, the child was tested for generalization of this teaching to untrained requests. Responses to probed requests were never prompted. The results show that, as requests from one category were taught, so the children’s responses to the untrained requests became increasingly correct. One child was able to satisfactorily discriminate among two and then three different categories of prepositional requests. The other child did not reach this stage, largely because his mother felt that the discrimination tasks were too difficult. However, there was evidence in training that this child could cope with more difficult tasks, and the success of the other child does appear to indicate that the teaching method employed was successful in teaching generalized receptive discrimination among locational prepositional categories.

Although operant techniques have been successfully used to modify the classroom behaviours of children, some recent suggestions for the implementation of specialist educational interventions have emphasized the need to individualize instruction which utilizes such methods. The present study shows evidence of individual variations within marked group effects in an operant situation. The presence of such variations to responses which are modified by powerful reinforcers suggests that recent trends in special education towards mainstreaming need to take individual characteristics of subject-behaviours into careful consideration when implementing policies in the normal classroom.

A program aimed at improving the quality and quantity of oral exchanges between teacher and pupils during oral language sessions was examined. The particular program devised and implemented focused on reducing pupil call-outs by means of a group contingency procedure where time spent on listening to a story being read was contingent on keeping below a particular call-out rate. The study involves the use of Grade Seven pupils as data gatherers and suggests that beneficial social ‘spin-offs’ resulted between the Grade Seven and Grade One pupils. The reduction in the rate of call-outs during both treatment phases was statistically significant. Reinforcement (i.e., story reading), either partial or maximum, was obtained 80% of the time.

A child classified as learning disabled can function better in the school setting where the academic environment is structured under a competent instructor who is a well-ordered individual and who finds joy in teaching. The special teacher is seen as a sensitive person possessing those qualities of knowledge and dedication necessary to individualize instruction and to help each child to feel successful in the classroom regardless of his limitations. A comprehensive over-view of the aspects of classroom structure for the learning disabled student is discussed in relation to the writer’s own experiences as principal of a school for learning disabled children in Akron, Ohio, U.S.A.

The number of agencies inevitably involved with families of handicapped children suggests the necessity for co-ordination of services and liaison among professionals in the helping professions. This paper argues for the primacy of parents as both coordinators of services and fully informed partners in all decisions affecting their handicapped children. The far-reaching implications of this proposition for educational services are briefly discussed in the context of current developments in special education.

In a recent article in this journal (1979, pp. 23–24), Dr. Jim Irvine argued a case that parents should not only be fully informed in decision-making processes related to their handicapped children but they should act as co-ordinators of services. From a SPELD viewpoint, this case is timely and quite appropriate. Many professionals whose major interest is in meeting the needs of the clients of service systems, viz., children and their parents, would strongly support such a case. Those who are more interested in organisation-maintenance or status-protection, and less in client service, would probably resist such an orientation. From my experience as a parent and as an educator, there are far too many professionals dealing with parents who direct most of their professional energies to protecting their organisation and/or their own status – to the detriment of the parents and the children concerned.

Community management is proposed as a sound, economical and demonstrably successful alternative in the management of young and disabled children. The author seeks to go beyond the health-education debate in this matter towards a welfare oriented model based upon principles drawn from a diversity of disciplines. One such principle incorporates the natural law of utilising forces to counterbalance forces – a principle fundamental to most areas of science but one which is rarely extrapolated for use within social science generally, or management of the disabled specifically. In the Darling Downs project in Queensland, Australia, resource families are deployed to counterbalance or assist “disabled” families with the support of professionals in the community network. The paper sets out the variously derived principles underlying the Darling Downs project and then provides a detailed description of other aspects of the framework including funding, administration, services, procedures and current developments. The programme is then analysed in terms of its anticipated directions, strengths/weaknesses, limitations and applicability to the other situations.