ABSTRACT
From the point of view of practitioners and professionals the future of special education currently appears very uncertain. The economic circumstances of the early 1980s and cuts in the overall education budget appear to threaten the existence, and certainly the expansion, of this sub-section of the education system. The president of the National Council for Special Education spoke in April 1980 of ‘new-style Luddites who have won power and are wielding axes against all social machinery’, including the machinery of special education (National Council for Special Education, 1980). Practitioners have, since the mid-1970s, demonstrated their anxiety that the integration movement might threaten their hard-won ‘special’ expertise, that normal schools will retain what special schools have come to regard as their rightful clients, and that the rationale for this special sub-section of the education system would disappear (see, for example, Ainscow et al., 1978; National Union of Teachers, 1979). The section included in the 1981 Education Bill, empowering local authorities to close special schools, may also cause some anxiety.
