[The changing situation of the school for the physically disabled owing to the rising numbers of most severely and multiply disabled pupils (author's transl)].

The author outlines a group of disabled who are suggested to be inadequately covered by the usual targets of rehabilitation (reintegration in the labour market, independence in the activities of daily living, starting a family--in short: "normality"), because of the presence of severe and extensive disabilities or disability combinations. Starting from an analysis of the living situation these children are facing in their childhood, and a projection on the living situations to be expected in adulthood, the essential principles of an educational concept are developed which, at the price of departure from established educational ideas, is intended, ideally, to enable the course of education to be adjusted to the living situation of the individual. These individualised programmes must be based on an established right to being different, and insistence on the inalienability of equal value and equal rights as a task of education in the schools for the physically disabled.