Special education is a complex knowledge area containing several different approaches and perspectives, and is both a research area and a sphere of activity. Special education in Sweden may be said to have been started in connection with the introduction of general elementary education in 1842. The decision to introduce the remedial teacher education may be said to constitute the origin of special education as a knowledge area of its own in Sweden. In Sweden, since the decentralisation reform of 1994 it is the municipalities that are responsible for making decisions on special education, which has created great variation in how special education is organised. In the policy document of education, there was a mini-course for "the children who did not correspond to the concept of normality implicitly defined by the Elementary Education Ordinance, the children whose parents were worst off financially and children described as maladjusted".