ABSTRACT
Recognition that people with mental handicaps can speak authoritatively about their needs and can successfully take on participating roles in the planning and provision of services, is beginning to have a direct impact on the organisation of provision and professional practice. The roots and growth of self advocacy have been different in different countries and localities. The self advocacy movement amongst people with mental handicaps has highlighted the critical need for education in terms of these people's own views of themselves, their capabilities and their rights, and in terms of professional and public attitudes towards them, the services they are offered, and professional practice. The logical and moral necessity of the current view of education and mental handicap is to teach discrete, functional skills where they are lacking so to better the end product and move it towards the aim of independence.
