Abstract
There has been much debate concerning the pros and cons of special and mainstream education for young people with a disability. This paper adds data to this debate by reporting the educational experiences of 20 high‐achievers with congenital disabilities who live in the United Kingdom and were born between 1950 and 1970. It presents personal accounts of the high‐achievers’ perceptions of how their education, which was either purely in special schools, in mainstream schools or a combination of both, had influenced their transition to adulthood. While those who attended special school considered it to provide a supportive environment that permitted the cultivation of their personalities without the constraints of non‐disabled barriers, many others thought it prevented them as disabled children from interacting with non‐disabled peers, thus inhibiting social integration between the disabled and non‐disabled world. This was the main perceived advantage of mainstream education although problems of physical access meant that some choices were out of reach. The findings highlight how both special and mainstream education can be compatible with career success of individual disabled people. The paper implies that a combination of the two systems may be needed to facilitate disabled students to develop psychologically, socially and cognitively at the rate of their non‐disabled peers, and proposes that link schools and partial integration could contribute to the achievement of such goals.