ABSTRACT
Changing the structure of professional training to encourage inter-professional teamwork is a process which therefore has to reckon with increasingly strong pressures towards specialisation and competitive standards and the extent of the changes that would be necessary throws the present system into an identity crisis. Sally Tomlinson shows that inter-professional collaboration in the assessment of the educational needs of children is marked by competition rather than by cooperation. Multi-professional teamwork is rhetoric, rather than a practice, and it has been defined in terms of respecting the differences between professionals rather that in terms of their common interests as equals. The effect of most professional training is the practice of specialised, hierarchical teams, in whose management not all members are equally involved. The medical model of teamwork was just beginning to be eroded and replaced by a two-tiered system of management with a triumvirate of senior social worker, consultant psychiatrist and educational psychologist taking major decisions and responsibility.
