What was life like in the 80s?

Yes I think it persisted in the health service Spidey66, though not amongst the OTs and SLTs that worked with schools.

I have no doubt the use of the word handicapped persisted in general society (it still does in France), but schools and professionals working with the children had changed to the Warnock recommendations.

They may have started being used then, but were not commonplace. I was at college in the mid 80s and worked in an NHS unit for people with learning disabilities in the late 80s till I did my mental health nurse training. Mentally handicapped was definitely the term we used then. I didn't hear of learning disabilities until the 90s. I've worked in learning disability and mental health nursing since 1986.

For anyone who is interested this is what tthe Warnock Report set out. It was law by 1981.
www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803121057612

Handicapped was definitely still a widely used term in the 80s.

@Spidey66 we were not using the term mentally handicapped in the eighties. Moderate learning difficulty, severe learning difficulty, profound and multiple learning difficulty and emotional and behavioural difficulty were what we used.
In my experience most special schools were good, caring places but sometimes expectations of achievement needed to be raised.

@x2boys
I did a course at the local FE college in social care in the 80s (I suppose it would be like BTEC now). Anyway we had placements in different environments including special schools. In my borough at the time there were x2 schools for children with severe learning disabilities (but back then they were termed 'mentally handicapped'), 1 or 2 for children with mild learning disabilities and I think 2 for children with physical disabilities. I think there was also a school for children with emotional/behavioural problems.

There was at the time more available for children with special needs. The large hospitals were closing so a lot was being put into community care. There was a fair bit of respite care homes, which seem to be lacking now.

School toilet paper was like tracing paper or greasproof baking paper. What was that all about?

On the subject of disabilities what where special schools like in the 80,s ? I remember doing a placement a t a disability daycentre for children , one mother had four sons with severe disabilities,they just went to the daycentre I don't know why the didn't go to school it might have been her choice , my son goes to a special school so this interests me .

Yes schools could reject children with disabilities in the 80's. It was the 90's that changed.
Interestingly I remember in the late 80's meeting a parent with a severely disabled child who was angry that the definition of disability was expanding. Because the local council was saying publicly it had increased its budget for kids with disabilities, but it had in fact actually cut its budget for kids with severe disabilities.

We certainly knew plenty about ADD / ADHD in our county, ASD was becoming better understood but was concentrated in specialist schools rather than in the units that appeared in the nineties, dyslexia and dyspraxia were diagnosed frequently and had support from peripatetic specialist teachers. We also had a brand new resource centre with full-time staff. We were very keen on developing multi-disciplinary teams with health professionals.
Actually I think schools today would be pretty grateful for the resources that poured in, in the eighties and nineties.
Of course there is never enough funding and the situation was still very far from perfect.

I remember at my school , the headmaster refused to take a pupil who had Down syndrome ,she was fairly high functioning and in this day and age would have managed in a mainstream school with support ,but he was just allowed to make a decision due to her diagnosis and she did end up going to another mainstream school

@summerremembered Yes I can understand that parents might use that as a defence mechanism from the horror. I think it is the same defence mechanism that causes some parents to be totally vicious on social media to parents whose kids have been snatched.

@JennyManara I agree that we experiences probably weren't the norm but if our little pocket of society held these opinions, they probably also happened in other pockets too. I think it was a way of parents distancing themselves from potential horror. it wasn't enough to say "that wouldn't happen here" because it did, but they could say "it won't happen to us because we've instructed our dc properly". It was all done with the best of intentions but ultimately misguided in execution.

As someone who was a working SENCo throughout the eighties I am slightly surprised by some of this. The influential Warnock report had come out in 1978 and it was a time when we were working hard to develop the focus on individual needs, work alongside children in the classroom rather than in withdrawal groups and focus on inclusion. I don't doubt that there were pockets of bad practice as there always have been, but it was certainly not the spirit of the time for those of us working in the field. Towards the end of the decade I became an advisory teacher working with the development of information technology for individual pupils with learning and physical disabilities. Much of that work was groundbreaking and hugely rewarding and we had lots of government money going into it.
It was a time of great change and a massive shift in attitudes.

I think there was very little understanding/ diagnosis of "higher functioning" needs such as ADHD (my mother was a health professional and freely said ADHD was made up) let alone ADD without the hyperactivity, and "higher functioning" (I know this term isn't liked by some but for want of an alternative) autism.

However I don't think children with profound disabilities were hidden away - we were allowed to choose voluntary work instead of lessons for general studies at sixth form, and I volunteered on a play scheme for children with disabilities on Saturdays, and we took the children with non verbal autism, cerebral palsy and fairly severe learning disabilities to the beach or playground and to cafes and shops etc and I never remember a negative reaction from the public.

The diagnostic criteria for autism was higher back then.

I think that's because children such as my son who has severe autism and learning disabilities would have been hidden away, and children with say higher functioning autism and or adhd etc would have just been labelled as naughty or disruptive .

Yes that reminds me Jenny when I started my nurse training in the early 90,s I had a placement with the health vistirs( although I trained as a mental health nurse I did project 2000, and for the first 18 months we did placements in all areas of nursing) I remember visiting a family and the mum asked her friend where her son went when he played out ,it was for a 3 yr old development check !

There was very little awareness of SEN. Looking back now, it’s obvious several of the boys in our class who were ‘naughty’ actually had some sort of undiagnosed special needs.

@SummerRemembered I agree about the racism, homophobia and disablism. I worked with kids for part of the 80s and most parents would not have blamed kids of they were taken by a stranger or run over. Sometimes when people remember their childhood they can think that what was common in their social circle, was a sign of the times.
There was a lot of education about stranger danger including in schools. That is because they knew most of the kids would be at times not closely supervised outside. But there were still the kids whose parents were seen as neglectful as they let 3 and 4 year olds wander around without any supervision.

I'm 45 so I did GCSE,s in 1990 there was a lot of emphasis on course work, I don't recall there being loads of pupils with a string of A grades though ,just a few ,increasingly as the years went on it seemed there were more and more pupils getting top grades , I remember sitting maths GCSE at the intermediate level so the highest grade I could of got was a C grade, I remember you had to get 70% or over for a C grade , i do recall though that there was a massive leap from GCSE,s to A levels .

x2boys I agree - I went to a private school in the northwest and lots of GPs and country solicitors and farmers managed to send 3 or 4 children to private school and (apart from the farmers who generally didn't leave their farms) have holiday abroad every year, and full time seasonal summer jobs were fairly badly paid but easy to walk into for 14/ 15 / 16 / 17 year olds.

Clothes shopping was completely different. Obviously there was no online shopping, but shopping in itself was a big deal. Clothes had to last, there was no throwaway fashion.

We were taken to our local Mothercare as kids, and then later BHS or C&A on Oxford Street, to get new clothes twice a year.
Just a handful of things, really. I had one party dress at any one time, which I wore to all special occasions until I grew out of it.

In the late 80s I went to secondary school and was given pocket money which I saved up for months to buy clothing from Chelsea Girl.

O Levels were far harder than GCSEs

Definitely this. I did my O levels in the 80s and they were hard. "Normal" pupils just didn't get strings of A grades. We were impressed by the few "A" grade pupils in our classes - they were different league. I was in the top group for Maths GCSE and only got a D as did most of my friends! It wasn't a sink school either, it was an ex-grammar in a good area.

Last year my son did his GCSEs and I was heavily involved with helping and prodding him to do homework, revision, etc - the skills and depth required was not a patch on what we did in the 80s. Yes, I'd say there was a lot more of it, but it was examined at a much lower level, i.e. more topics but generally easier questions per topic.

I just don't understand who has benefited from grade inflation and dumbing down. If everyone is getting a higher grade, then no-one is better off. I just can't understand the thinking behind it at all.

I got a grade D in English A level in the 80s that was with lots of revision, lots of homework, generally working hard for it! I did it again for fun in the late 90s, by doing a one night per week college course. We had to study 4 books and a poetry collection, but I just didn't have time with family and work, so just picked up what I could from the lessons - I was close to not bothering with the exam because I just couldn't do the work I thought was necessary. Despite virtually no revision/homework over the year, I took the exam and got an A grade - I was convinced I'd completely messed up the exam because the questions seemed so obvious and easy to me - I was convinced I was missing something, but obviously not! The depth of my answers were far lower than in my first A level more than a decade earlier.