MEMBERS, friends, other institutes and WI advisers were welcomed to the October open meeting by president Sue Canfield.

The business was dealt with and various reports given. Results of the questionnaire on the way forward for Inkberrow WI would be available at the November meeting.

Jane Mowbray has been appointed recruitment officer. Details of future outings were given, including the Jewellery Quarter on October 12 and an evening with Jennie Bond on November 29 at Kidderminster.

The speaker for the evening was Ken Gilks, who gave an insight into his 16 years working as a teacher of children with special educational needs.

His experiences with these young people, though basically tragic, were portrayed with humour and understanding.

Most of the children had unhappy backgrounds and were mainly attention-seekers and the problems they caused stemmed from this.

He told members many amusing anecdotes of classroom behaviour, outings, camping trips and so on.

He also mentioned that, as well as teaching deaf children for some time, he had taught in a normal school environment and the worrying thing he had found there was the behaviour of some of these 'normal' children would, some years ago, have been classed as 'maladjusted.'

The evening concluded with the auction of members' home produce, ably and hilariously conducted by Betty Wilkes, assisted by her 'runner' Jane Mowbray.