Over its sixty or so years conductive pedagogy has proved itself a robust and adaptable educational approach. It can be used with small babies and their parents learning together, at a stage when the parent-child dyad (usually the mother-child dyad) is the basic unit of teaching, learning and development). It can be used in kindergartens and school classrooms; in ‘wrap-arounds’, out of school, at Saturday clubs and in summer camps; in follow-up, in shared placements and in local mainstream schools. For those who can afford it there are now even ‘conductive nannies’. Moreover, learners are no longer just those with motor disorders. Starting in the United Kingdom, Conductive Education has been successfully adapted to children with dyspraxia and is now also commonly used for the benefit of children with profound and multiple learning difficulties, including some without cerebral palsy.

Above school-leaving age it is provided for young disabled adults in further education and vocational training, for older people who have been disabled all their lives and for those who acquire disability later in life as a consequence of disease or accident. In such contexts the adaptation should presumably be known as ‘conductive andragogy’ but the term has never caught on! ‘Conductive rehabilitation’ is more readily understandable.

Indeed even the word pedagogy, still alive and kicking on Continental Europe, falls uneasily on English-speaking ears. It implies knowing what to do in order to teach something – or at least possessing a robust and relevant algorithm – to ensure that learners actually do learn. It is a core subject in teacher-training courses on the Continent but its unfamiliarity in the English-speaking world has led to the clumsy and sometimes misleading usage ‘Conductive Education’ or, worse, to naive attempts to implement it simply as a system of exercises, pedagogy-free! Misunderstandings lead to myth and there are myths aplenty about Conductive Education.

Conductive Education is not ‘selective’: it has a contribution to make to anybody who can learn and, as already stated, an underlying assumption of Conductive Education is that everyone is capable of learning. Conductive Education is not ‘intensive’, except for the conductors: learners should experience the process as seamless and absorbing. Conductive Education is not antagonistic to existing therapies, communication devices, mobility aids etc: the system has always been magpie-like, picking up techniques and approaches that appear conducive to its goals – though of course rejecting those in opposition, especially those acting to make learners passive. Conductive Education is not opposed to the state’s academic curriculum: conductive pedagogy is a means, not a content, though conductive educators have the right to question the validity of education systems that put so much emphasis on the latter and so neglect the former. And Conductive Education is not ‘against inclusion’ (and certainly not ‘for special schools’): it advocates ‘dynamic inclusion’, akin to the idea of the ‘least restrictive environment’ fundamental to special-educational law in the United States, with the additional fillip of aiming to create new potential and modifiability through education.

Currently there are some two hundred settings employing conductors round the world, mostly to work with children. Most of these are founded and funded outside the state sector, usually in direct response to the aspirations of parents of disabled children. Most of these are small, some are tiny and they are distribute according to no geographical or demographic logic other than they are almost all situated in ‘rich countries’. Nearly all, however, struggle financially.

Some countries which followed the United Kingdom’s early lead over Conductive Education have now forged ahead, In New Zealand, for example, Conductive Education based in local primary schools is part of the regular state provision and the first unit in secondary school has just opened with a FCE-trained conductor at its head. Norway, with a very different way of providing for disabled children and their families, is incorporating Conductive Education into its national child habilitation system. In Canada the Ontario March of Dimes, a major provincial service, is creating a long-term strategy to provide a comprehensive conductive system for children and adults. FCE is currently training conductors for Norway and Canada. The United States made a slow start over the nineties and many of its conductive programs are short-term and intermittent though a few small schools are now well established and making accommodations to local regulations and existing services.

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