What do motor problems have to do with learning?

This is an area of learning that is all too frequently overlooked, because the focus and measure of success of a child and a school’s ability to educate that child have tended to be based on academic achievement since the 1970s. However, when educators begin to look at children’s lifelong needs of social acceptance and emotional stability as well as educational achievement, the need to develop the physical capabilities of a child become all too obvious and essential. This understanding is not new; indeed the Plowden Report (1967) emphasized the need for teachers to take account of a child’s intellectual, emotional and physical ‘developmental age’.