Educators currently in senior positions in our public education and training institutions experienced school as children in a New Zealand society very different from 1987. In theirprofessional careers, they have witnessed some staggering changes to which they have had to adjust.

In this paper a model of teachers’ attitudes to integrating children with moderate learning difficulties into ordinary classrooms is described. The basis of this model is an AID analysis described in a previous paper (Thomas, 1986) and an analysis of the spontaneous comments of teachers in unstructured interviews. The sample consisted of 550 teachers in Tucson, Arizona and Devon, U.K. drawn from primary, secondary and special schools and advisory services. From the data of the unstructured interviews, four factors, not mentioned in the earlier paper, are included in the model. These are: traumatic experiences with the handicapped, class size, the what-happened-yesterday factor and leadership. Some implications of the model, the generality of the findings and suggestions for future are included in the discussion.

This paper will address issues associated with the use of suspension and exclusion as an intervention for dealing with disruptive behaviour in schools, with a particular focus on secondary students in Western Australia. There is increasing support for the view that many of the students suspended or excluded from school for disruptive behaviour may be socially/emotionally handicapped and as such are being denied access to an appropriate education on the basis of their handicapping condition. The legal and service delivery implications of this position are discussed within the context of current Australian special education policy and international agreements pertaining to the educational rights of children.

This article summarizes recent research on effective classroom management practices that teachers can use to enhance learning and to prevent, or at least minimize, the occurrence of misbehaviour. Suggestions for creating and maintaining an appropriate climate for learning are discussed. Strategies that are particularly effective in teaching mildly handicapped students are emphasized and procedures for evaluating the effectiveness of one’s management practices are discussed.

This paper investigates, in an Australian context, the psychometric properties of reliability and construct validity of a scale to measure the attitudes of teachers toward the integration of handicapped children into regular schools. The responses of a sample of 301 primary school staff were factor analysed to determine the factorial validity of the 30-item scale. The scale was found to have an underlying conceptual framework of five factors, which could be used to investigate various aspects of a teacher’s attitude toward integration. The psychometric characteristics of the scale indicate that it is both reliable and factorially valid in an Australian context and that it is valid to make comparisons between American and Australian data using the scale.