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Charles Henley believes there must be an informed debate before the Valuing People strategy can be made to work.

I noted with interest the question posed in the article concerning the implementation of the Valuing People strategy: "Are the new structures and guides sufficient to make the strategy work?" (page 28, 17 January).

For the past 30 years I have watched the successive efforts of practitioners to modernise day services, only to be defeated by bureaucrats and policy-makers who have failed to learn from past mistakes.

Invaluable research and vast human, financial and material resources have been consistently wasted and inestimable deprivation inflicted on people with learning difficulties as a consequence of radical philosophies being put into practice without adequate research.

The failure to develop a cohesive national day care strategy can be traced to a prolonged debate concerning the basic elements of the "ordinary life" philosophies that surfaced in the 1960s but came to a head in the 1980s.

The question at that time was not whether greater community integration should be pursued, but how best it could be achieved. The realist view was that an evolutionary method that provided a specialist and structured range of opportunities for users was preferable to that of the radical ordinary life idealists.

The idealists considered that all specialist services and day centres could be dispensed with and ordinary community resources could meet the needs of people with learning difficulties, however severe, profound or complex the problems might be. An influential lobby swung the debate in favour of the ordinary life lobby by the mid-1980s and meaningful development of a realistic day service policy was put into a state of suspension and has remained there ever since.

Those local authorities that followed the ordinary life proposals failed to acknowledge that the assumptions on which they based their aspirations were fundamentally flawed. Unless these flaws are taken into account, the outcome for Valuing People will be bleak.

An informed and rational debate is needed that truly explores the best methods by which people with learning difficulties can be helped to maximise their use of ordinary community resources, to expose some of the myths and misconceptions left over from the denigration of traditional services, and to explore the validity of the assumptions on which much current thinking depends. Only then will the new structures and guides be sufficient to make the strategy work.

Charles Henley is a former manager of an adult training centre for people with learning difficulties.