Hearts and Minds: Social Role Valorization, UK academia and services for people with a learning disability

The relative roles of academic thinking and ideas, the particular set of ideas called normalisation, and other influences on services for people with learning disabilities are discussed. The paper argues that in the sixties and seventies the relatively small number of academics in the field dominated the thinking about services, but not services themselves. The development of the teaching of normalisation in the eighties is argued to have had a greater effect on services, though not on academic thinking, whose influence is, in any case, seen to be in decline. Confusion then arises as normalisation is reconceptualised as Social Role Valorization, both from the way this is taught in the UK and from academia's difficulty in coming to grips with which set of ideas are the ones that have influenced services. There is therefore little recognition, either in academia or the service world, of further refinements of SRV theory in the nineties.