In Britain, social workers are trained on a variety of courses in colleges of further education, polytechnics and universities. Some of these courses are intended primarily for non-graduates and last two-years, others are four year undergraduate courses combining a first degree with professional training, and the remainder are at postgraduate level. Students in the last group may have graduated in any discipline from the humanities or the physical, biological or social sciences, many have degrees which included the study of psychology for one, two or three years, and some of these are honours graduates in this subject. The postgraduate social work courses last one or two years depending on the subjects covered in the students' first degrees.

Cullen and Gathercole's review (B.A.B.P. Bull., 1976, Vol.4) of Mahoney's book, Cognition & Behaviour Modification, Ballinger, 1974, prompts me to take up my pen in defense of Mahoney and attack what I believe to be the unfortunate position that some radical behaviourists find themselves in. My reaction to Mahoney's book was very different from that of Cullen and Gathercole's. Fair enough, perhaps, as we each have our own standpoint on how cognitive behaviour modification is or should be. Nevertheless I feel some necessity to present my own views as I do not believe that Cullen and Gathercole's review did justice to the book as a whole. I found Mahoney's book to be an exciting and welcome departure from the current trend of books on behaviour therapy. It is not a review of existing behavioural techniques; nor an idiosyncratic view about what clinical practice should be. Mahoney has focussed carefully on one important and developing area in behaviour modification and provided a lucid, well-informed, thoughtful and at times amusing analysis of the clinical and experimental work pertinent to that area. Regardless of whether one accepts his conclusions or supports his theoretical position, I think the quality of the book should be recognised. Cullen and Gathercole spend most of their review discussing and rejecting Mahoney's theoretical views about mediational models. This is fair enough as their concern is primarily to demonstrate that such models are of little or no use in experimental or clinical psychology.

What is behavioural psychotherapy? In the following note I do not intend to give a comprehensive answer to this question but rather to put forward a point of view and to illustrate it using one particular example. It appears that the term ‘behavioural psychotherapy’ has acquired a rather restricted meaning in the relatively short time it has been around. In many senses the term Behavioural has become synonymous with scientific i.e. the sort of knowledge gained by the application of experimental techniques to a problem. This I believe is all well and good. The restrictive aspect comes when we consider what sort of problems have been tackled in the ‘behavioural way’. On the whole it seems that we have concentrated on treatment aspects of psychotherapy and appear to have made substantial inroads into problems of therapy. We have now available a plethora of techniques e.g. systematic desensitisation, flooding, modeling, token economies, which had been demon-stated to be efficient in the past. In addition to this there has been a concerted effort to develop a method which enables a degree of experimental rigour to be introduced into the treatment of the individual case (see Mathews, 1975; Leitenberg, 1973).

Judging from the interest that has been shown in our research project - the Teacher-Child Interaction Project - and from the number of requests we have had to talk to various groups all over the country, there is a growing awareness of the value of behaviour modification in education. However, the various groups interested in these developments seem isolated from each other, and have no obvious forum to discuss areas of mutual interest. It would seem to us that the B.A.B.P. could provide such a forum.