Deinstitutionalisation

Over the last 50 years deinstitutionalisation has dominated the development of social policy for people with learning disabilities in most of the world's richer countries. In this commemorative issue we will attempt to place what we have learned about the successes and failures of deinstitutionalisation in the light of three themes that are clearly evident in the work undertaken by Tizard and his close colleagues: the unrealised potential of people with learning disabilities, the importance of measuring and analysing quality in residential services and the value of applied research.