ABSTRACT
The history of education of visually impaired people in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Britain has often been considered briefly, perhaps in a cursory resume of Pritchard's account which stops at 1960, along with a remark or two about later legislation. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were many debates in Great Britain regarding the pros and cons of segregated and integrated schools for blind and visually impaired children and youth. Throughout Great Britain the provision of educational instruction for partially sighted students was more mixed. In Britain terms such as "a person with a visual handicap" were used as a broad descriptive term, while "blind" and "partially sighted" were specific categories that were used to describe individuals in terms of the degree of visual loss. While the educational implications of visual impairment should be weighed carefully, visual loss became one of many factors.
