ABSTRACT
Provision for students with special needs in mainstream schools is in crisis. The concept of 'individual differences', currently growing in popularity as an alternative to 'special needs', is equally tradition-bound. Mainstream schools will need to rethink fundamentally their roles. They will no longer be providers of limited forms of education to limited categories of student, within a much larger structure managed for them by the local education authority. Rather they will be self-managing securers of effective learning for virtually all students. The model posits autonomous schools working within a framework set by what people have called an enabling structure. It envisages schools collaborating together in clusters and making joint use of support and development services. Accordingly the model envisages virtually all students becoming the responsibility of mainstream schools, with the enabling structure providing or commissioning only certain forms of strategic provision for such groups as deaf-blind students or students with severe emotional and behavioural difficulties.
