ABSTRACT
In recent years there have been some profound changes in thinking and policy about the needs of people with learning disabilities. Some of the broader trends are obvious to the public gaze: the tradition of housing learning disabled people from an early age in large institutions, where they have had little contact with the wider community, has been replaced by a move towards community care and social integration. Implicit in that has been a recognition of the entitlement of learning disabled people to those ordinary aspects of living that the rest of us take for granted as necessary to our well-being: the possibility of active, ¯exible relationships, the exercise of creativity, the possibility of employment, and so on. Much of the most recent thinking in the UK is summarized in the White Paper Valuing People (DOH 2001c; see Chapter 1 of this book).
