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in the company of the course tutor I was invited
by the (then) Ministry of Health s Training
Council for Teachers of Mentally Handicapped to
join a small panel of four members set up to
review various training courses for teachers of
mentally handicapped children throughout the
country and for this purpose visited courses at
Cardiff Kingston upon Hull and Wolverhampton.
On my return from the United States I
purchased a television camera with videocorder
and monitor, and was able to put this to good
use in making video tape recordings of experi
mental work with children which could be used
later both as a record of progress made and for
teaching purposes as a demonstration of experimental
techniques
An Experimental Summer School for Children
with Language Retardation
Headstart classes in the United States of
America have been going for some years now
they began in an effort to use the months of the
long summer holiday (frequently from mid-June
to early September) to provide what is now often
termed compensatory education for young
children - particularly negro chi Idren from
economically and culturally poor families
Research over many years has demonstrated that
these children start schooling lacking in many of
the abilities required for intellectual readiness
to profit from formal education The aim of the
Headstart classes has been to help this readiness
to come about so that instead of starting school
at a disadvantage and becoming progressively
less able to keep pace with average achievement
levels until eventual drop out theoretically
the Headstart children are able to profit fully
from the education that is offered from the
beginning of schooling The Headstart pattern
in the U S A has changed a good deal over the
years and some innovators such as Bereiter and
Engelmann (1) have aroused much controversy
with their approach Nevertheless in a society
where the number of dropouts from the
educational system is large particularly of
adolescents from underprivileged groups the
matter of enabling children to profit fully from
formal education is one of great urgency both
politically and educationally and innovators at
least get a hearing
The tradition of Summer School is much
older Summer School both in this country and
in the U S A have been associated more with
further education for adults than with pre primary
education However in the U S A many children
who are struggling at school may get extra
tutoring during the summer vacations at privately
run summer schools and sometimes in the
numerous Summer Camps
The Summer School which was organised
jointly by the Senior Speech Therapist Mrs Cox
and myself during the five weeks of July and
August in 1968 owned more to the Headstart
idea than to that of the traditional summer
school in that all the children were young the
three oldest had either just turned seven or were
about to and some had not yet started formal
schooling but were at home or in day nurseries
By and large these could not be called culturally
deprived children- although some came from
comparitively poor socio economic backgrounds
others were from families with average or better
than average social and economic status The
unifying feature among this mixed group of children
was a fairly severe degree of retardation in
language development even when allowances were
made in some cases for below average levels of
non verbal intelligence Of the chi Idren who had
started school already one boy of six with multiple
congenital abnormalities was in the nursery class
at Martindale School another boy just turned seven
with a high frequency hearing loss was in an
infants class for partially hearing children and
another boy also just seven was in the infants
class at a junior training school (having been
transferred from a reception class in a normal
infants school which he had completely disrupted
by his wild and destructive behaviour this had
more or less disappeared in his new educational
environment) This last boy like his sister aged
five who also attended the Summer School had
almost no speech and no understanding of what was
said to him Two little girls of six and seven were
in classes in normal infants school both having
severe difficulties in articulation of speech as
well as in understanding and using language and
another boy was also in a normal infants class
showing a big gap between his understanding and
production of language and his non verbal abilities
as assessed by performance tests where he was
above average for his age of six years One pre
school boy had a high frequency loss and was due
to begin schooling in the nursery class for partially
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