Abstract
The aim of the study was to examine published professional communications by psychologists in France and Great Britain on a topical issue — integration — during the year of 1983, as a reflection and comparison of present status, practice and current ideologies. British psychologists, secure in their central legal involvement in the assessment procedures of the new 1981 Education Act, did not raise integration of handicapped children in the ordinary school as an issue. A theme running through their literature was the issue of integrating assessment/intervention-type procedures of applied behavioural models with the legal requirements of assessment/classification of children with special needs. Much concern was expressed by French psychologists, in relation to the two integration Circulars of January 1982 and January 1983. They saw the Circulars affecting directly the conceptual framework within which they worked, the development of individual skills and their more precarious career prospects. Criticism was made of the lack of definition of handicap, reducing the child to a single scholastic dimension, and thus confusing psychology with pedagogy.
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