A comprehensive biography of Albert Kushlick who was one of the early pioneers of equal citizenship for all.
Author: Paul Williams
Paul Williams was a member of Albert’s team pursuing the possibility of community care for all in the 1960s and 70s, and he remained a friend until Albert’s early death. He has written a comprehensive biography of Albert to ensure he is not forgotten as one of the early pioneers of equal citizenship for all.
In the UK in the early 1960s there were 60,000 people with learning disabilities, many of them children, living in large groups in isolated institutions. However, there was a developing philosophy that looked forward to the presence and participation of those people as citizens in ordinary communities. During the 1960s this became largely accepted for children and the most able adults. A government White Paper entitled Better Services for the Mentally Handicapped was published in 1971, proposing that no children should be accommodated in large institutions and the number of adults there should be reduced by half.
Some people, however, believed the principle of community integration should and could be applied to all, regardless of degree of disability. During the 1950s, 60s and 70s a number of pioneers had promoted this principle. By the end of the century their early groundwork had resulted in the closing of nearly all institutions and the development of care services for people with learning disabilities based in ordinary housing in ordinary communities. These pioneers should not be forgotten. They include Jack Tizard and Neil O’Connor, Alan and Ann Clarke, Peter Mittler, Stanley Segal, Herbert Gunzburg, Rex Brinkworth, Ann Shearer and Maureen Oswin amongst others.
Another of these pioneers was Albert Kushlick, a psychiatrist born in South Africa, who lived in the UK from 1956 to his death in 1997. In the 1960s and 70s he ran a project in the South of England to investigate the feasibility of catering for the residential care needs of all people with learning disabilities in small groups in ordinary communities, regardless of the degree or kind of their difficulties. He later developed individual therapy with the people and their families, again to enable all of the people to remain in their local community. He was also heavily involved in opposing apartheid in South Africa and racism in the UK.
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The publisher is Paul Williams. A Biography of Albert Kushlick © Paul Williams 2026.
Inclusion, intellectual disabilities, social justice, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Paper
