A variety of strategies have been pursued in different countries to address the needs of children whose mother tongue is a low status language and not mainstream. These include assimilatory approaches, bilingual language support, and the use of regional or local languages or dialects for all children, not just those who have an indigenous background. Many ex-communist countries, building on their interpretations of psychologists such as Vygotsky and Luria, also had infant curricula, more didactic than the Spanish model, where certain words and ideas were taught, especially music and poetry recitations. There is a view that manufactured toys are aggressively marketed to parents and their excessive use and display requires children to become consumers by requiring them to continually exercise choice amongst an array of artificial materials. Their level of competence cannot be satisfied by play material where there is a right answer determined by adults.
Some children find learning difficult because of a physical or mental disability.
Attitudes to disability also vary considerably. In some systems it is argued that early diagnosis of disability is very important and specialized and separate remedial attention be given as soon as possible, whereas others argue that any labeling is premature and integrated settings potentially offer greater learning support. These models are all institutionally based. More recently, in the UK a competency based model has been developed, whereby workers are assessed on their competency in the workforce as measured by national accreditation schemes. Accreditation schemes rely on fixed criteria and assumes that learning is sequential, cumulative and directly measurable, whereas both the pedagogue and the teacher model assume that training is about challenging preconceptions and beliefs, and that learning comes from reflections on the problematic content of knowledge, and knowledge skills and attitudes are to a certain extent open-ended and cannot always be precisely defined.