CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background to the Study There is growing concern about increasing number of youth and children with special needs in our communities in Ghana today, who like any other children, must have the opportunity to go to school. The term special needs or children with special needs refers to individual learners whose needs arise from physical, emotional, sensory, behavioural and intellectual conditions that have a long-term adverse effect on their ability to access the regular education facilities. This includes individuals with various disabilities such the mentally retarded, the hearing and visually impaired, and the learning disabled individuals. In the olden days, children with special needs had their education mainly in the few segregated special schools spread across the country. However, owing to the fast growing number of individuals with disability, it is now common to find a good number of them in the regular schools in the various communities. The result was that educationists began exploring various educational arrangements including mainstreaming, integration and inclusion that could bring together both disabled and non-disabled individuals in the same classroom to pursue the same school curriculum. Inclusive education is a concept that allows pupils with special needs to be placed in the regular or mainstream classes to be taught by mainstream teachers. Inclusion, which is the most current perspective in education, is the combination of pupils with and without disabilities in one classroom. Thus pupils with special needs are placed in regular classes and are taught by a general class teacher. This is based on the assumption that children of all abilities can learn from each other given the appropriate environment, and that children who learn together learn to live together. This programme