I am a teacher and I am going to be working with a child with cerebral palsy who has severe visual impairment from August. This child will be attending a mainstream school with support from staff from a Visual Impairment Unit within the school.

I am looking forward to teaching this little girl but at the same time am aware of my limited experience in this area. I will be able to give this pupil some individual attention in relation to the formal curriculum and will endeavour to tailor everything I do to suit her learning needs. However, I have been searching sights during my holidays to look for hints or tips on how I can enable this little girl to visually attend for longer periods than she can at the moment and to see if there are any other suitable materials that I can use to help her to develop both literacy and numeracy skills.

I have met this pupil over 9 visits to her nursery class where she was in the ’special unit’ with children with other severe additional support needs. This little girl may find the mainstream school (with almost 500 children) rather daunting but I feel that she should be given the chance to learn alongside her able bodies and sighted peers.

Any help would be greatly appreciated because I have five weeks of holidays left and will have time to make resources and get reading to prepare me to teach this little girl and enable her to reach her full potential. Thank you!! Elaine

Your link was for the school, which is a site not maintained by me personally. I can be found at http://paces.typepad.com/

What mostly drives me is the lack of debate about the education of children with cerebral palsy: how should teachers be trained? is there a need for a specific (not “special”) pedagogy? is there a need for specific curriculum? If we broaden this to include (a) very young children, what can we learn, for instance, from neuroscience about learning and development - and what does this mean for early years programmes? (b) adults, during and after transition from formal, full-time education systems, what should we be putting in place to support lifelong learning and well-being (mental, physical, emotional, cognitive)?

The only systematic answer I have ever come across is conductive education.

You are right to say that as my daughter has left school behind her, her Mum and I have been shocked at the lack of adult provision to replace it. Lately I’ve been having a rant on the internet, on another blog. It seems to have done the trick! We’ve just today had a really promising meeting. (http://paces.typepad.com/hallam_health_care/)

Well, I’m now booked to fly into Vancouver on 31st May and fly home again on 7th June. Might there be a chance we can meet up again? It would be great to do so.

Norman