Extensive work has been done in North America to examine practices recommended to facilitate postschool transitions for youth with disabilities. Few studies in Australia, however, have investigated these practices. This study drew on the Taxonomy for Transition Programming developed by Kohler to benchmark practice at government and nongovernment schools throughout Queensland, Australia. A statewide survey was used to gather data from teachers and other influential staff (N = 104). Participants were asked to (a) indicate their level of agreement that each practice was a program quality indicator and (b) report on the current use of that practice in school programs. Transition practices in the areas of Family–School Relationships, Student Development, and student-focused planning were strongly endorsed and frequently implemented. Lower levels of endorsement and implementation, however, were signaled in the areas of Interagency Collaboration and Program Structure. Recommendations for reform at the school, systems, and interagency levels are provided.

A mother's ability to identify consistently what she perceives to be communicatively salient behaviours is considered to be fundamental to the process of responding sensitively to prelinguistic infants. The present study investigated the ability of 35 mothers to identify consistently what they perceived to be communicative acts by infants at three ages (0;6, 0;9, and 1;0). Each mother coded the same videotape of her infant's behaviour on two occasions, three months apart, and observed measures of agreement (consistency) between coded records were obtained. A randomization procedure was used to provide distributions of chance levels of agreement between coded records with which observed measures were compared. Comparisons of the mothers' coded records indicated that they were able to identify infants' communicative acts consistently at each age.

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The extent to which mothers and fathers agree on what they identify as their infant's communicative acts was investigated. Nineteen infants (6 at 6 months, 7 at 9 months, and 6 at 12 months) and their parents participated. A randomization procedure controlled for the frequencies and durations of the communicative acts identified by the parents, and the procedure produced a distribution of 10,000 “chance” agreement values for each parent pair with which their observed level of agreement was compared. The results indicated that, generally, parents could identify their infant's communicative acts consistently, and that observed levels of agreement between parents were significantly higher than would be expected by chance. Differences between mothers and fathers on their identification of communicative acts are considered in terms of the emergence of the infant's intention to communicate.

Thank you for the invitation to deliver the Des English Memorial Lecture. As a young junior teacher I knew Des English and am well aware of the contributions he made to special education in Victoria and nationally. Reading a number of the Des English memorial lectures delivered over the years, a central theme seems to be one of progress, over time, about what has been achieved and how the lives of persons with a disability have been changed by special education professionals. The creation of change in behaviour that brings about more positive outcomes in lifestyle for persons with a disability is the core business of special education and, as I say to my students, if you don't think you can create positive behaviour change in your students you should go off and do something else. As many of the papers delivered at this conference will assert, the points at which the effects of our efforts to create behaviour change and positive outcomes for students are more visible at the various points of transition in their school lives. The transition point where outcomes are brought more sharply into focus is the transition from school to postschool, for it is here that the immediate outcomes of the transition are highly predictive of where graduating students will spend the remainder of their lives. This is, of course, not to deny the important contribution that the preparations for earlier transitions made to this change to adult life, but it is this aspect of our students' journey along the continuum from childhood to adulthood that has been of interest to me. My interest in school-to-postschool transition first arose as a teacher in a junior vocational high school and later as a special school principal in Canada and my association with Professor Roy Brown, who achieved so much in improving the quality of life for young adults with disabilities via the Vocational Research and Rehabilitation Institute at the University of Calgary. His influence in this regard remains highly visible in the province of Alberta to the present day. So, I would like to make some comments on three things. First, what does Australian research into school-to-postschool transition tell us about outcomes for students with an intellectual disability once they have left school? Second, I would like to present some data collected in a study conducted in Queensland in 2005/06 by myself and colleagues from Griffith University on the postschool outcomes for