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14.
affect a whole life-time whereas strokes are largely confined
to elderly people who have already completed most of their
useful lives. By the same token it is a hardship to become
deaf at seventy but a disaster to be deafened e.g. by measles,
in infancy. The expectation of life at birth is now 68 years
(women as usual, have an extra six) compared with 59 before
the war and 40 years a century ago. This does not mean that
children now will live nine years longer than their parents
and nearly thirty years longer than their great grandparents,
but that practically all of them will reach three score years
and ten. With a few notable exceptions, already marked for
an early death, most of the children attending our special
schools can look forward to a lifetime normal in length if
not in breadth. Whether they will be seventy years of useful
life depends very much upon early diagnosis, treatment and
training and, as a necessary corollary, suitable placement
in employment of some kind.
Children ascertained as handicapped are required to •
spend an extra year at school (until 16 plus) to compensate
to some extent for the necessarily slower tempo at special
schools. If the last two years could be biased (as in
Technical Schools) towards some form of vocational training
this might be of great benefit to them. One sixteen year
old whose damaged heart condemns him to a sedentary job,
wants to become a television servicing technician but he has
learned only elementary and come commercial arithmetic and
no science whatever. How one could set about organising
preliminary vocational training in such small schools I do
not know, while with the present staffing position they are
practically restricted to the three R's' . As it becomes
possible to transfer more of the handicapped children to
normal schools, so do those who remain tend increasingly to
be the heavily and multiply handicapped children. For these
the statutory maximum of twenty to a class is far too high to
afford them the individual help they ought to have and there
is a great need for more teachers to undertake this necessary
and rewarding work. On leaving school all substantially
handicapped children are notified to the County Welfare
Officer at Chelmsford who assumes responsibility, with the
Youth Employment Officer, for their future welfare. It is
perhaps mfortunate that the Health Department cannot continue
to supervise the welfare of these young people whose disability
is. after all. due to a medical condition.
For the future I do not believe that the number of
children needing special school placement will be much further
reduced Indeed, for the physically handicapped it may increase