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What does it feel like to be a teenage boy with hardly any physical autonomy? What is the emotional experience of a disability so complex and multi-faceted that there is
no speech, movement, continence or physical agency save for a slight head or finger movement? What does school mean for him? What education is there?
Reading this moving and hopeful extract gave me a profound sense of historical change.
Until almost 50 years ago, Corrie would have been condemned to a life in hospital. It was my father, Professor Stanley Segal's pioneering work and seminal book No Child is Ineducable in 1966 that led the Government in 1968 to transfer responsibility for the education of children with severe learning difficulties from health to education authorities at national and local level. He can also take the principal credit for persuading the Government to set up the Warnock Committee on children and young people with special educational needs in 1974, which paved the way for the 1981 Education Act.
It was also in part thanks to the Tavistock Clinic's Mental Handicap Workshop founded by Neville Symington in 1979 and continued by Jon Stokes, Sheila Bichard and myself for the next 20 years or so. All our writing (Bichard et al., 1996) helped to establish that psychotherapy with children and adults with mild, severe and profound multiple disabilities became acceptable and indeed is now properly integrated as a service at the Tavistock. We pointed out most forcefully that capacity to make use of therapy depended on ‘emotional intelligence', a term we created long before Daniel Goleman popularised it (Stokes and Sinason, 1992)!
Nevertheless, in the current climate of severe cuts, it feels a real triumph that Corrie has been seen weekly for three years. It would be interesting to know whether the school pays for the therapy time from its own teaching budget (the main way some schools creatively recognise and fulfil such a need) or whether it has been provided onsite through the local