Aimee Richardson and Tara Leech are still on a high after passing their Junior Certificate. The two girls, who have Down's Syndrome, are ready to pull out the small official piece of paper to display the marks they got, every time the exam is brought up in conversation. Only recently did cards from friends and neighbours stop coming through the letterbox congratulating the two 17-year-olds on their achievement.

An estimated 8,000 pupils in mainstream schools are classified as having a "specific disability": this, however, includes students with all forms of learning difficulty and not just conditions such as Down's Syndrome.

The Department of Education does not keep statistics on the number of people in mainstream schools with Down's Syndrome, saying "we don't categorise, we treat everyone individually on their merits". However according to St Michael's House, which provides support and services to children with learning disabilities, only a handful of their 100 children attending mainstream schools have gone on to take State exams. Aimee and Tara's case is therefore particularly unusual.

The girls' success story is a combination of hard work, bravery, dedication and persistence. The persistence came from the girl's parents to get them into a secondary school in the first place. Not all schools feel able to take on people with learning disabilities and then there are some who just don't want to.

Class sizes and a lack of resources, such as extra teachers specifically for those with learning problems, are the issues that schools face in taking people like Tara and Aimee. But prejudice does also exist.

The bravery is on the part of the two girls who go to schools every day where they look different and do not always fit in so easily. While other children in school warmly greet them and are helpful towards the girls "they don't linger", says Aimee's mother Natalie Connolly. Both mothers recognise that ordinary 15-year-olds cannot be expected to take on board someone who needs to be looked after, but they say that it is hard for their daughters all the same.

The hard work came when the girls were studying for their Junior Cert. "Our kids are going to have to work an awful lot harder than the rest of the class to achieve even at the lower end of what the others would achieve with less effort. So there is always that extra determination required," says Suzette French, educational psychologist with St Michael's House. While the girls say they studied hard before the Junior Cert, difficulties arose in the exam.

Colm O'Connor, a remedial teacher at Cabinteely Community School in Dublin, says Aimee had problems getting the information she had in her head down on paper. Tara's mother adds that choice in the exam and time management made things difficult for her daughter. People with Down's Syndrome are not given special arrangements in exams which pupils with visual, hearing, physical or medical problems are. The Department does not allow special arrangements on the grounds of "intellectual ability" and so those with Down's Syndrome must sit exams under the same conditions as any other student.

Hard work also came in on the part of the girls' parents. Both school's attribute the girl's success to the fact that their parents were particularly committed.

Tara's father helped her during the woodwork class where she built a birdcage for the exam; her mother says it was difficult to know when to stop helping coming up to the exams.

The general effort in bringing them wherever they needed to go and giving them every support was crucial to helping them pass the State exams. "In choosing integration for their children, parents know they are going to have to put in an awful lot more work," says Suzette French. She says that while some parents choose to put their children into special schools so that their specific needs can be met, the benefits of mainstream education are obvious. "A lot of it is around social benefits because the kids feel they have a role model and adapt to appropriate classroom behaviour," says French. For some parents, sending their children to mainstream schools is often about trying to integrate them into the community and give them as normal a life as possible. Tara's mother recalls the day she went to talk to a teacher in a special school about enrolling her daughter. "When the teacher spoke to me she turned her back on the class and they all just sat there and never said a word." That was the day she says she decided to put her child into a mainstream school. The dedication was on the part of the teachers who worked with girls. Aimee had a remedial teacher and a classroom assistant who helped her during classes to understand and follow what the teacher was doing.

Tara, in St Tiernan's Community School, also in Dublin, had a learning support teacher who took her in small groups with other children with learning difficulties. Teachers in both schools say they were torn between meeting the needs of Tara and Aimee and ensuring that the other children in the class also got enough attention.

"The only thing a teacher would feel is guilt that she can't give the one-on-one attention that they need," says Mary Kerwin, Tara's learning support teacher. Similarly, Colm O'Connor said he had to withdraw from giving Aimee a lot of attention as he felt other children were losing out.

Tara and Aimee are both in Transition Year and are loving it. Both schools, too, say that everyone has benefited from having the had the girls attending over the three years "Other children in the school benefit even more than ours because they learn to respect," says Leech. "They see that the normality and the disability is not that divided." Both girls are now heading towards doing the Leaving Cert Applied and their mothers are very pleased about this.

"It means this year and for the next two years they are doing something constructive, being occupied from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and developing," says Connolly.

Because there is continuous assessment in the Leaving Cert Applied, Colm O'Connor says he feels Aimee is even more suited to this exam than the Junior Cert.

But the future, which haunts the thoughts of parents of people with Down's Syndrome, is never too far away from Shelagh Leech's mind. "I want a protected living for Tara because I don't trust the outside world: they are likely to exploit her," she says.

"If you put Tara at a dirty job, she would do it forever. I know that people deserve a change but she wouldn't fight for the change." The only hope for Leech and many other parents like her is that thinking will shift, just as it is shifting with regard to education, and their children will have some of the opportunities that they had.

Both Tara and Aimee have benefited from the work of the Visiting Teacher Service.

It is, in fact, one of the quiet successes of the Department of Education. It has grown from small beginnings 25 years ago, when the department began to make the expertise of the teachers of the deaf available to children with a hearing impairment and their parents in their own homes, as well as in the special schools.

What was then a far-seeing and innovative initiative has now grown into a comprehensive service for these and other groups of children with special needs.