ABSTRACT
The curriculum in special education has to be seen in relation to the normal curriculum – whatever form that may take at a particular point in time. Pupils with special needs are not totally different from their peers, and neither is the education that should be offered to them. Special education has too long been bedevilled by isolation from the mainstream of schooling. Even though as far back as 1929 the Wood Committee urged a view of the special school as no more than ‘a helpful variation of the ordinary school’, the prevailing ethos has been one of separate development: once pupils enter a special school they seldom return to ordinary schools, and the work they engage in there often has little connection with the work being done in neighbouring ordinary schools.
