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child on leaving school at 16, preferring and using as a defence their instructions to wait
until the boy or girl is 18 before placing them in Remploy and thus emphasising to the
school leaver the enormous obstacles that face a handicapped person beyond school age.
Too frequently these young adults find that their disabilities have become an insuperable
obstacle after they have learnt to lead a near-normal school life and they become resentful,
mistrustful and difficult.
" Half-way house " training schemes between school and employment would overcome
some of the difficulties and a great extension of the present limited facilities for
training 16—18 year-olds is urgently needed. Until this is done it is inevitable that
these young people should develop into homebound, handicapped adults needing to have
ordinary social services brought to them and becoming dependent on outside help in the
house. They then become, like those handicapped in adult life through illness or
accident, the responsibility of the welfare departments.
The third category of school leavers is the unemployable and it is to these children
that most help must be given. The number is smaller but still unnecessarily large because
instead of three equally workable categories, the fully employable, the assisted employable
and die unemployable, we have in fact only those who can find work and those who
can't, with a very few who can be placed in the totally inadequate Remploy factories.
At the special school in this area arrangements have been made for the youth employment
officer, the welfare officer responsible for the handicapped in the County, the
school medical officer and the headmaster to attend a full school leaving interview with
the children and their parents so that there is as close a liaison between the three departments
as possible at this level. The medical officer from the local Remploy factory also
comes to the school and sees children considered suitable for referral to Remploy.
After this, however, the system breaks down. Of those considered employable, if
they do not get the jobs thought to be suitable by the medical officer, headmaster and the
youth employment officer, there is no follow-up supervision to reconsider the suitability
of alternatives, although on a completely unofficial basis, the youth employment officer
and the medical officer responsible for the special school and the headmaster are in
frequent contact.
The need for an After-Care Committee is self evident and although it would have
no statutory powers outside the Education Act, together with members co-opted from
the Welfare Department and from voluntary agencies it could do much to follow the
progress of the handicapped school leaver and to bring the problems to the notice of the
appropriate departments.
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