ABSTRACT
After a two year survey of remedial work in Scottish schools, HM Inspectors in their report, “The Education of Pupils with Learning Difficulties in Primary and Secondary Schools in Scotland", referred to hereafter as the Progress Report, proposed that the response to such difficulties should be planned on a whole school basis because the range of learning difficulties is so wide and their nature so complex that it is too much to ask that they be tackled by the provision of remedial teachers alone. The report emphasised that the major source of difficulty lay in the curriculum and how it is presented. At this time, this was a new and radical approach.
A series of seminars held by the Inspectorate followed, involving Education Authority personnel at senior level, College of Education, advisers, headteachers and promoted staff in schools in discussion and debate. This culminated in an acceptance of the principles enunciated in the report and in an agreement that new forms of in-service training should be devised to meet the needs of staff involved in operating the new roles of the remedial specialist, specified in the Progress Report, particularly consultancy and cooperative teaching.
The case study which follows describes how this was put into operation at national level, and at local level involving one College of Education and one Education Authority, and presents a model for staff development based on an analysis of the changing needs of pupils, and teachers, and the organisations within which they operate.
