ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1979 John Morton, head of a day ESN(S) school, spent a fortnight living with four mentally handicapped adolescents from the Leavers Group at his school, observing how they coped, living in an ordinary house where the adults involved (himself and an assistant observer) adopted a strategy of ‘minimum intervention’. By withdrawing much of the help and support the teenagers were used to receiving he hoped to find out how autonomous they could be, and how effectively they had been prepared for an independent life by their homes and school Here he gives an account of a typical day during the project, preceded by a description of the four teenagers. All four had Down’s Syndrome, but their personalities and abilities differed greatly.
