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We, in this Authority, feel that the shortage of qualified teachers does not
justify the lack of a teaching programme for the young mentally handicapped
children. Non-professional "mothers" of the right personality can undertake
the job of fostering child/mother involvement by building up a series of tasks
leading to this purpose. This approach has been successfully tried in other areas
and there is no reason why it should not be incorporated in the care of a mentally
handicapped child's educational needs in Lambeth.
At present, therefore, our mentally handicapped children have an added
handicap to their specific learning difficulty: the teaching handicap.
CONCLUSION
With reference to the plan of care of handicapped children (see Page 1),
the score of our endeavours appears to be as follows
Early identification is achieved in reasonable degree, but there is still room for
improvement.
Complete assessment is carried out in a variety of ways, and leads to surfacing
the medical, educational and social needs of the mentally handicapped child.
We believe that early intervention benefits the handicapped child and his
family, otherwise we would not have built and maintained the extensive system
of early assessment.
Prompt medical and surgical treatment is carried out in hospitals serving this
area and we are deeply appreciative of this service.
As regards psychiatric treatment, its extent and value (except in individual
cases) cannot be assessed by us because of our lack of sufficient knowledge of the
various methods of psychiatric treatment, and of approaches to psychiatric
diagnoses in a young child. There is a clear indication for improvement of psychiatric
education of doctors working in community child care, and there is also a great
need for far more information being communicated by psychiatrists and for more
personal involvement of community doctors in Psychiatric Departments, on the
pattern adopted by some Paediatric Departments.
Parent guidance (sensu stricto) is not adequately covered, except for some individual
parents attending certain hospitals which deal specifically with the behaviour
problems of handicapped children.