The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of decentralisation for Australian special education service delivery. Initiatives to decentralise educational service have become afocus of education policy both in Australia and overseas in recent years, although there has been little discussion of its effect on special education. This trend is examined from an Australian perspective. Problems associated with the provision of special education services are discussed in conjunction with an overview of the school based management of special education services.

This study was designed both to evaluate the Biks and Gutches test as a measure of morphological development in children within special education settings, and to determine whether or not these children have acquired a generative morphology. Two groups of children were pretested on the Biks and Gutches test. An experimental group received a short teaching program designed to familiarize them with concepts underlying the Berko procedure. Both the experimental and the control group were then retested on the Biks and Gutches test. The teaching program enhanced performance, indicating that this test might in part reflect abilities other than morphological development. Children experienced greater difficulty with nonsense word than with real word items. However, performance on comparable real word and nonsense word items was strongly correlated, indicating that these children have acquired a generative morphology.

The Parental Strengths and Needs Inventory was administered to 60 Black mothers and their preadolescent children. Most of the mothers, despite a lower than average income, formal schooling and family stability enjoyed being parents, successfully performed the tasks expected of them, and effectively taught essential lessons about life. In the estimate of themselves and their children, these mothers qualify as good parents. Both generations identified similar and differing aspects of maternal behaviour that should be improved. Youngsters contradicted their mothers regarding how well the adults handled certain problems associated with childrearing. Significant differences between the groups were obtained for some of the inventory items, with children commonly assigning lower ratings to the mothers than mothers assigned to themselves. Becoming adequately informed about the growing up experience of individual sons and daughters was identified by both generations as the mothers’ most prominent weakness. The findings offer a generally favourable view of maternal competence in Black families and is being used to develop a suitable curriculum for mothers.

Pull-out or withdrawal remedial instruction is the dominant service delivery model for regular class children with learning problems. The efficacy of this model has been in question for a number of years with claims that remedial instruction as delivered in such settings is neither special nor exemplary. The findings of the study reported here suggest these claims may be accurate, and they raise questions about both the training and deployment of resource/ remedial teachers.

In addressing the subject of resourcing special education programs in times of economic restraint, I want to say from the outset that I do not view the concept of “restraint” in a completely negative sense. In many ways it is in times of restraint that some of ourmostconstructiveand creative planning for effective service delivery occurs. It is at times such as these that we need to take a critical look at what we are doing in the area of program provision and to ask ourselves whether we are meeting needs and achieving outcomes, or whether, in fact, we could be doing better.

It is a singular honour for me to have been invited to deliver the inaugural Len Cosson Memorial Lecture. It is obvious that Len’s Stirling contribution to special education in New Zealand will endure. His ability to enthuse peers and students alike will live on and will affect for the better the quality of the lives of young people with disabilities. Despite his untimely death, his family and professional colleagues can be comforted by the knowledge that Len’s ideas and vision will remain a beacon for those who follow in his footsteps. He has provided some very real challenges for the New Zealand Special Education Association - challenges that will be met if you emulate the truly professional approach that he maintained throughout his illustrious career. He obviously lived to the full the values and precepts that many of us aspire to, but often fall short of. While I did not have the privilege of knowing Len, I feel enriched by being in the company of so many people whose lives he touched in such a profound way.

In the following presentation I wish to report the results of a study that examined the postschool experiences of 73 young people with a range of disabilities who left a special education facility in NSW in 1985. The roles that work, family support and friendship patterns played in their postschool experiences are analysed. The study points to the need for a more coordinated approach to the planning and delivery of transition education services to young people with disabilities.

This study utilised a Direct Instruction methodology to test the efficacy of small group social skills training on the acquisition and generalisation of conversational skills of three moderately to severely intellectually impaired adolescents. The results indicated a general increase in the conversational behaviour of the participants over the course of the intervention and that for two of the participants these changes generalised to a new setting with new conversational partners.

Consider the following pattern of events in special education teaching. You have identified a four-step procedure that is important for the current topic you are working on with your students. The topic might be in a curriculum area like mathematics or in a behavioural area such as social skills. You devise and carry out a series of lessons on this topic and, after a suitable period of practice, you are pleased to observe that the steps in the procedure are used successfully by most of the group. The procedure is also used on the day following the original teaching, when you reinstate the training situation and conditions: Many of the students produce the procedure without prompting! The next day you test to see whether the students will use the procedure in a situation which involves a modification to the conditions you used in the original training. You might change the format of the mathematics problem or the social situation. For many of the students it seems as though your teaching in the use of the procedure never occurred. They act as though the procedure no longer exists. They do remember it when you remind them of the original training situation, but they don’t do that unless you provide the reminder. They have learned the procedure but they can’t transfer that learning.

This paper examines and critically evaluates the concept of mastery learning, ranging from its early development by such writers as Bloom and Keller, through to its various applications from preschool to tertiary levels of education, concluding with some speculation about future developments.

Note: This article provides the theoretical background for the Social Skills and Employability Project in South Australia. The Project was established in 1989 by the S.A. Education Department (Northern Area) and the Institute for the Study of Learning Difficulties. It is a school and industry based project designed to develop personal, social, and vocational skills for young people with special educational needs. The author has agreed to write a further article describing the program in action. This will appear in a future issue of the journal.

The ability to question students effectively is, without doubt, one of a teachers most valuable assets. Through questions students can be led to make discoveries about the world, and to pose and solve their own problems. It must be recognised, however, that children may need tobe taught how to respond to different tyres of questions, and how to use questions to elicit the information they want. Despite the possibility that questioning can be overused (Wood, Wood, Griffiths, & Howarth, 1986), and the accusation that it can reduce the quality of conversational interchanges in the dassroom (Tizard & Hughes, 1984), the ability to question and respond to questions remain as important classroom behaviours: “Teachers and studerts who learn to comprehend the functions of the various types of questions can be expected to have more control over their enquiry” (Mann-Mandlebaurn, 1990).