ABSTRACT
Australia and New Zealand share a common heritage in that each has grown up within the same broad legal and political traditions and has English as its dominant language. The areas of special education and rehabilitation have figured prominently in government initiatives. After 1983 a new pattern of Commonwealth educational funding and organization was implemented. The provision of education and other services is a dynamic field, its main challenge being to combine the benefits of normal curricula and participant experiences with the necessary degree of technically sophisticated instruction. The education of the deaf in Australia was very much influenced by the Ewings, teachers at the University of Manchester, who visited the country in the 1940s and promoted an oralist approach which is the subject of controversy. The small numbers of children with a combination of severe visual and auditory disabilities tend to be placed in schools for the multiply handicapped.
