The exact origins of conductive pedagogy are not known, other than it originated immediately following the Second World War out of the professional practice of Austrian-Hungarian physician, András Petö, himself a person of no little mystery. In the years between the two wars he had worked as a doctor in and around Vienna but there is no record of his actual practice. He was Jewish and when in 1938 the Nazis occupied Austria he fled briefly to Paris, then vanished, reportedly to Hungary where he is said to have sat the war out in Budapest till the city was liberated by the Soviet Army in 1945. In the ruins of Budapest he re-entered history, providing in-patient care for people with chronic conditions, doing so without money, equipment or trained staff, using what and who came to hand and his own determination that his patients should take their lives into their own hands and live them to the full.

What we now know as conductive pedagogy was created out of these experiences. Petö’s early ‘movement therapy’ was not initially directed particularly to motor disorders, though providing for survivors of the great polio epidemic that swept Hungary along with the rest of Europe soon afterwards did steer it towards paralysis. And from the outset it was for adults as much as for children. Petö appears to have had powerful friends in the Party who in the early fifties established for him a State Institute and helped counteract some of the antipathy and opposition that his work attracted from the medical establishment. In response he asserted the essentially pedagogic nature of his practice and in the early sixties his Institute left Health and went under the auspices of the Ministry of Education. Petõ was already a sick man: he died in 1967.

Under this Ministry Petö’s Institute became increasingly ‘a school’, though continuing to run a small follow-up and adults’ service and actively developing a service for babies and their parents. It also elaborated formal professional training for those who undertook this work, called ‘conductors’. Both the school and the training were of course typical of their society at the time (schooling and analogous services for disabled children throughout Central Europe, where available at all, tended to be provided almost wholly on a residential basis).