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11.
The proper placement of the handicapped child is at once
a stimulating challenge and a great responsibility to the School
Medical Officer. These are all exceptional children who cannot
easily be fitted into a normal class and whose needs must be individually
and comprehensively assessed. The extent and prognosis
of the child's disability, its intelligence, the home conditions
and the parent's attitude; most of all, perhaps, the personality
structure of the child itself. All these, and other, factors
must be weighed and a choice made from the schools available.
When this choice is correct the result is soon gratifyingly
apparent in the progress shown; when it is wrong the child with
a disability already is further handicapped.
The policy of the Ministry of Education is to use every
endeavour to place handicapped children in normal schools and
most school medical officers endorse this view. The natural
result of this is to concentrate in the special schools the
most severely affected children - the squarest of square pegs.
The gradual replacement, by schools built on spacious modern
lines, of the multi-turreted Victorian edifices which contained
more stairs than pupils, is making it possible for many handicapped
children, even wheel-chair cases, to attend a school be
it modern, technical or grammar, which will provide opportunities
no special school can afford. This is a welcome contribution
towards lessening the need for those necessary evils - the
special schools.
Advances in therapeutics too, have removed diabetics from
the handicapped category and have so improved the control of
epilepsy that many of its victims can live virtually normal
lives. A fit once or twice a term does not completely disorganise
a class, indeed, the other children are usuallyquite unconcerned
(not so the teachers, but the more stout hearted of
these learn to put up with it.)
The antbiotic drugs have played a major role in eliminating
much disabling illness in children. Mastoid infection, a potent
cause of deafness in the past,is now rare,as are chronic kidney
disease and the permanently damaged hearts which used often to
follow scarlet and rheumatic fevers. The 'antibiotic umbrella'
together with the advances in surgical technique now permit operations
to be undertaken to repair the damaged heart valves in
rheumatic carditis and a whole series of repair and shunt operations
for congenital heart defects. Children with permanent
damage and chronic infection in the lungs can sometimes have the
affected lobe or segment removed and,like many of the heart cases,
can return to ordinary school life with little or no disability.
But a large share of the credit for reducing the incidence
of disabling conditions is owed to preventive medicine. Prom
the Ante-natal Clinic to the Youth Employment Service children's
health is supervised as never before. Improved nutrition,
housing, clothing and hygiene have all helped to raise the