Building Community Strategies Working Paper No. 1 the Het ten vite Mark Burton Building Community Strategies King’s Fund College 2Palace Court London W2 4HSAUSTRALIAN INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY SERVICES: Experiments in Social Change Report of a study tour, November to December 1987 supported by the National Health Service Training Authority MARK BURTON0... ee___————_ PREFACE ‘At the end of 1987, Mark Burton visited Australia with support from a NHSTA Travelling Fellowship to study programmes for the resettlement of people with learning difficulties from institutions into | community settings. This report of his study provides an interesting | account of how two states, New South Wales and Victoria, have gone about establishing large-scale strategies for de-institutionalisation and the governmental leadership this has required. More importantly, Mark's analysis of the Australian experience draws attention to the magnitude of the social changes implied by these resettlement programmes which, at their most fundamental, are concerned with including the excluded in the process of everyday life’. He argues that change of this nature requires both a broad alliance tor reform and a vision of the future which can give coherence to this social movement His analysis suggests however that these alliances may prove insufficiently robust as the pace of change accelerates, current visions may have failed to think through the full implications of social integration for service delivery and public bureaucracies may not be sensitive enough to achieve the individually focussed local action required Mark has himself been an influential leader in local service development in Manchester and a contributor to the important strategy promoting an ordinary life for people with learning difficulties in the North West as a whole. He is well placed therefore to draw out the lessons from these abservations for people thinking seriously about | how best to achieve principled and large scale change in the United Kingdom. Through its ‘Building Community Strategies Working Papers’, the College is therefore making this report more widely available. | March 1989 David Towell