Dave Hewett PhD. is well known within the education and care fields for his invaluable work on communication with both children and adults who have severe and profound learning difficulties (with or without autism). However, because his work until recent times has tended to occur within more segregated services, he is only now becoming known to staff working in mainstream education as the children with more severe learning and communication difficulties are beginning to receive inclusive schooling. In this article he shares his thoughts, backed up with research, on the importance of touch for us all, but focusing on the reasons this needs special attention for those who have profound additional disabilities. Before concluding, the author offers us some very useful tools when working with children where touch and intensive interaction may be part of a teaching programme to help in building a relationship, and opening early communication channels.

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New ways of stimulating a response from 'difficult to reach' pupils with multiple handicaps are often sought, less often found. Melanie Nind and Dave Hewett describe their interactive approach which is based on 'mothering' skills and is in contrast with objectives-based methods. Both authors teach at Harperbury Hospital School, Hertfordshire.A young woman teacher sits on the floor in a corner of a large classroom facing a big adolescent male. They are both crosslegged, but so close together that their forms overlap. Their foreheads are nearly meeting, enabling the intimate and highly enjoyable exchanges of facial expression and verbalisation which are taking place. They rock gently in concert. Occasionally the teacher seems to vary thetempo, or the game itself, so that she eventually tick!es the young man in a loud and highly dramatised way, having first given him several opportunities for enjoyable anticipation of what is going to happen. This sequence is repeated several times with variations. Though there is evidently warmth and easy familiarity in the way that the two people blend their behaviour, there is also rapt, intense concentration as they study each other for the signals and feedback that they each receive. Around the classroom other staff are engaging pupils in similar ways and there is a stimulating atmosphere of fun-filled tranquillity.'Mothering', 'lntensive Interaction Teaching', 'Structured Interaction Teaching' are names given to the methods presently being used in Harperbury Hospital School and (to our knowledge) pioneered in Springfield School, Leavesden Hospital, as a means of promoting the development of language, cognition and sociability in pupils with the most severe and complex learning difficulties (see Ephraim, 1979;Fyfe, 1980;Davis, 1985).This article describes the development so far of this curriculum within Harperbury School and our current preoccupation to develop the practice into an effective and clearly described method.The teaching method has developed from analysis of the work of researchers and writers who have studied and described the critical learning that the infant experiences while interacting with the mother or primary caregiver in the first 18 months to two years of life. 'Mothering' skills are the basis of our teaching but our method has a clearly defined structure which we believe is necessary if it is to be an accepted part of our school curriculum.We shall try to describe how we use these interactive techniques within the classroom, although we rcalise that we can never adequately convey in a single written account the tremendous variety and quality of activities possible which the method offers. We shall write briefly about the ways in which a school curriculum previously based largely on behavioural principles is likely to change when teaching comes to be based on how children are intrinsically motivated t o learn -the 'process'. By 'process' we mean here a series of learning experiences where the stress is not on an expected end product. We have come to realis...

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