In Victoria Guidance Officers provide school psychology and guidance services to families and schools. Most are located throughout Victorian centres which service local school communities and these by and large provide a generalist service which is supplemented by the service of statewide specialists.

New recruits are drawn from the teaching service and those teachers with the necessary combination of experience, qualifications and personal qualities are eligible to apply. There is usually a new intake each year and this number varies according to staff ceilings and vacancies. In 1983 the intake was 45 trainee Guidance Officers which was the largest number of teachers ever recruited. These trainees were allocated to local centres where they would undertake their supervised apprenticeship, which together with the compulsory central training, would make them eligible in two years to become registered Guidance Officers.

The issue of tests and testing has recently become the subject of public debate in New South Wales. This issue is of course not new, and has been the subject of much controversy, particularly in the United States, over the last thirty years or more.

In New South Wales the issue has surfaced over the use of standardized tests of general ability in the last year of primary schooling. These tests are applied routinely in State schools to all students in Year 6 as part of the normal school assessment program. The purpose of the testing, as stated by the Department, is to obtain a measure of the student's general reasoning ability to supplement other information on the student's school attainments. This information, it is argued, can be used by the class teacher or the resource teacher to plan appropriate teaching programs for individual children, and to identify children who may have special needs, or who should be referred to the school counsellor for further individual assessment.

If you are a psychologist interested in children with learning problems, the odds are high that one of your main assessment tools is the WISC—R (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children — Revised). Yet the WISC—R has come under heavy criticism in recent years, because of the lack of a theoretical rationale for the subscales as measures of intelligence, and the lack of a rationale connecting the assessment measures with remedial procedures. In this paper I'll briefly review these criticisms, and concentrate primarily upon reviewing a recently released test battery (the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children) which claims to overcome these two criticisms.

The Ministerial Review of Educational Services for the Disabled came out strongly in support of the right of disabled children to pursue their education in the ordinary classrooms of regular schools.