Background: Universities are deeply rooted in a tradition of exclusivity. However, for the past several years, they have been called upon to develop in an inclusive and socially responsible manner that does justice to the plurality of society. This has led to the emergence of diverse practices and projects around the world that are intended to…

Background: Many parents with learning difficulties face high rates of child welfare intervention and child removal. In contrast to other high-income countries, there has not been any published research on the lives of mothers and fathers with learning difficulties from an Austrian perspective. After presenting an insight into the international…

Mutual Support, a model of peer support by and for people with learning difficulties, was constructed through a participatory research process. The research focussed on individual narratives from people with learning difficulties. These narratives were then brought together to form a collective model of support. This paper outlines the detailed…

This article describes research undertaken between 2004 and 2006 about the issues faced by 15 young people with a wide range of learning difficulties in out-of-area residential schools and colleges at transition. The process of transition planning was hampered by the distance between the school/college and the "home authority" of the young person;…

By means of documentary evidence and six in-depth interviews, this paper traces policy and practice relating to the education of visually impaired children with learning difficulties from 1900 to 1970. It reveals that if visually impaired children with learning difficulties were given an education at all, their needs were not usually met and they…

Mothers with learning difficulties are often isolated within their local communities. They also report low levels of social support. Social disconnection is associated with high levels of stress and poorer mental health, and in turn, adverse parenting and child outcomes. In the study reported here, a multi-site, intervention group only, repeated…

This paper reports on exploratory work investigating how children with severe and profound learning difficulties register an awareness of small quantities and how they might use this information to inform their understanding. It draws on studies of typically developing children and investigates their application to pupils whose response to…

The prevalence of offenders with learning difficulties and learning disabilities is not agreed upon. What is clear, however, is that, regardless of actual numbers, many offenders have learning difficulties that reduce their ability to cope within the criminal justice system, for example, not understanding fully what is happening to them in court…

This paper looks at the history of self advocacy in England. Self advocacy has helped many people with learning difficulties to speak up and gain more confidence. But now it is associated with Government policy. After Valuing People, people expect self advocacy organizations to speak up for everyone with learning difficulties. This might mean…

Visual impairment, although often unidentified, is common in people with learning disabilities. However, despite the high incidence of sight problems, little guidance has been produced on accessible information for this varied "group" of individuals. This paper, which develops the Information for All guidance [Rodgers et al.…

This article is about Emma's experience of living with learning difficulties. Emma expresses a lot of anger, and talks about feelings of loss. This article is interesting to people with learning disabilities because they can see if their experience is like Emma's in any way. This paper presents Emma's story: her experience of living with learning…

The provision of appropriate accessible or easy information has been recognized as a right for people with learning difficulties (Department of Health 2001a). However, there is a large and growing group of people with learning difficulties whose needs cannot be met by the use of techniques such as short sentences and appropriate pictures or…

In 2005, the Royal College of Psychiatry Faculty of Learning Disability's three judges unanimously awarded the inaugural Medical Student Essay Prize to Ian Harwood, a mature medical student at Barts & The London School of Medicine. This reflective piece records an undergraduate's contact with an adolescent suffering from advanced Sanfillipo…

Maintaining therapeutic programmes for people with learning disabilities over long periods of time presents a major challenge to care systems as the limited and slow pace of client behavioural change is often insufficient to sustain staff behaviour. In this study, a 17-year-old young man with profound learning difficulties was successfully…

Many people with learning difficulties want to tell the stories of their life and have done so in collaboration with academic researchers. Life histories of people with learning difficulties are a good way to learn about self-advocacy. Life histories can tell us about how self-advocacy began and the support people need to be self-advocates. Tom…