ABSTRACT
Implicit in the spirit of the 1981 Education Act (GB. DES, 1981) is the need for there to be a partnership between all those working with the child with special needs, so that by a ‘joint endeavour’ they will be able ‘…to discover and understand the nature of the difficulties and the needs of individual children’. As a result of the full assessment procedure and the child’s ‘statement of need’, the mainstream teacher will need to learn how to work with a wide range of different people who will visit the class regularly, in order to ‘treat’ or ‘support’ or ‘care for’ the child. The special school teacher is accustomed to sometimes having more adults than children in her classroom, and to planning a timetable around those of the therapists. This interaction does not always go smoothly, even in a special school where classes are small and the demands of the curriculum are less intense; there is no reason at all why things should be any better in a mainstream setting. Mainstream teachers should not feel guilty if they sometimes resent the number of intrusions upon their teaching programmes; that feeling is understandable, especially if there has been no warning of imminent visitations. When this is the case, teachers are often angry because they would like nothing better than to be able to sit and talk to the visitor about the child but cannot because there is no one else to cover the class.
