ABSTRACT
The findings of our research discussed in this and the following chapter are still of relevance today. Indeed had I not indicated that it took place between 1982 and 1984 you might well have believed it to be a contemporary study. None of the researches summarized in the previous chapter considered the problems of children whose mother tongue and first language was not that used in the school, whose parents’ expectations might be different from those of the teachers, with whom they might have difficulty communicating. Yet, as we found in our research on children with special needs in preschool units in the West Midlands in 1981/2, even by that time, in some schools the majority of the children were from minority ethnic groups, though the proportion varied widely from school to school. In the 1980s in Birmingham, already about 25 per cent of the births were to parents of Asian ethnic background; a further 9 per cent had at least one parent of Afro-Caribbean ethnic origin.
