ABSTRACT
This chapter examines in-service needs of both teachers and special needs specialists faced with teaching children whose needs they feel ill-equipped to meet on their own or even fully understand. This in-service approach to support and training is thus concerned with staff development at several levels of the learning process: the cognitive; the perceptual/affective and the interactional level. Helping teachers to experience how tackling their difficulties with 'difficult-to-teach pupils' need not be seen as grit in the machine but as part of the job and an opportunity for all their other pupils is clearly a challenge at any time. There is an increasing demand for school-based help for teachers to meet the special needs of their hardest-to-teach and neediest pupils. The consultative case discussion model answers both these demands, in line with the warning that 'for pupils with emotional/behaviour problems, there are dangers in over-emphasis on "managing" the behaviour without attempts to understand the child's feelings'.
