ABSTRACT
Children with special needs are not educated in isolation. Those born with handicaps and their families will have been involved with the various support services from birth and will have encountered different branches of the health service and social services. Working together implies members of the services concerned knowing each other well enough to trust and inform each other, so that the development and education of the child is supported fully. Part of working together knows something about what each member of the team supporting the child is doing. Each service tends to have its own principles about how confidential information is to be treated and to be hesitant about sharing information with people in other services. The social services offer the school a further link between school and home and will be supporting the family in the case of children with special needs. The school nurse should also help to ensure that teachers have information about individual children.
