The Australian Association of Special Education was inaugurated in late 1975 when representatives of State special education groups met and agreed to form a federation to pursue their aims at a national level. The Association has pursued its objectives through its constitutional and organizational structure since that time. On occasions, progress has been rapid and exciting in its scope and potential. By contrast, there have also been periods of consolidation, of hesitancy, and of frustration. Perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of AASE has been its inability to have its council delegates meet frequently enough to provide the basis for discussion at a level which assists consensus, and precipitates progress.

Using prompting and reinforcement procedures, two intellectually handicapped children in a parent oriented language teaching programme were taught to respond correctly to categories of locational prepositional requests. Training sessions for parents and daily parent teaching sessions for the children alternated with weekly probe sessions. During home teaching a child was taught to respond to one request and then, during probing, the child was tested for generalization of this teaching to untrained requests. Responses to probed requests were never prompted. The results show that, as requests from one category were taught, so the children’s responses to the untrained requests became increasingly correct. One child was able to satisfactorily discriminate among two and then three different categories of prepositional requests. The other child did not reach this stage, largely because his mother felt that the discrimination tasks were too difficult. However, there was evidence in training that this child could cope with more difficult tasks, and the success of the other child does appear to indicate that the teaching method employed was successful in teaching generalized receptive discrimination among locational prepositional categories.

Although operant techniques have been successfully used to modify the classroom behaviours of children, some recent suggestions for the implementation of specialist educational interventions have emphasized the need to individualize instruction which utilizes such methods. The present study shows evidence of individual variations within marked group effects in an operant situation. The presence of such variations to responses which are modified by powerful reinforcers suggests that recent trends in special education towards mainstreaming need to take individual characteristics of subject-behaviours into careful consideration when implementing policies in the normal classroom.

A child classified as learning disabled can function better in the school setting where the academic environment is structured under a competent instructor who is a well-ordered individual and who finds joy in teaching. The special teacher is seen as a sensitive person possessing those qualities of knowledge and dedication necessary to individualize instruction and to help each child to feel successful in the classroom regardless of his limitations. A comprehensive over-view of the aspects of classroom structure for the learning disabled student is discussed in relation to the writer’s own experiences as principal of a school for learning disabled children in Akron, Ohio, U.S.A.

In a recent article in this journal (1979, pp. 23–24), Dr. Jim Irvine argued a case that parents should not only be fully informed in decision-making processes related to their handicapped children but they should act as co-ordinators of services. From a SPELD viewpoint, this case is timely and quite appropriate. Many professionals whose major interest is in meeting the needs of the clients of service systems, viz., children and their parents, would strongly support such a case. Those who are more interested in organisation-maintenance or status-protection, and less in client service, would probably resist such an orientation. From my experience as a parent and as an educator, there are far too many professionals dealing with parents who direct most of their professional energies to protecting their organisation and/or their own status – to the detriment of the parents and the children concerned.