Last week, we reported on one Channel 4 News video about the difficulties parents of Deaf children have accessing communication support.
Here, in their second video (part of the same original item broadcast on Channel 4) they report on a mainstream school in Manchester where the children are learning sign language in order to include deaf pupils – and improve all pupils’ educational attainment.
In the video, a pupil also explains her difficulty in following classes supported by the Communication Support Worker when the pace was too fast in lessons.
Deaf journalist and documentary maker Cathy Heffernan was a producer on this item, and we will be posting an interview with her tomorrow morning – look out for that!
Watch the video below, or click here to watch it directly on Facebook:
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Cathy
May 17, 2016
I find these videos rather sad to watch. It does seem to be the case that Deaf children are no better off than my generation was and we did not have Communication Support Workers nor Cochlear implants. Both of these were unheard of back in the 60s, so why have Deaf children not improved exponentially?
Are cochlear implants no better than hearing aids? That is my impression of them, thus far, which means as they are no more effective than standard hearing aids: the price should be halved, at least! £40,000 for one of these is ridiculous if Deaf children’s language skills are not improving!
And what is going on with CSWs? Are they not helping Deaf children to keep up with their peers? Do they have extra, individual support? If not, why not? If such assistance is virtually useless are we not throwing good money after bad?!
It is all very well forcing all the children to sign but improvement needs to be tailored to individual Deaf children’s needs if we want to see tangible results, such as in exams.
It is a crying shame that we are making no progress and when these Deaf tots reach high school, then College and work will everyone be signing? Of course they wont! Are we setting them up to fail in adulthood? It certainly has the elements for it, sadly.
Andrew Houghton
May 20, 2016
I’ve met a lot of parents who have brought their children up using Cued Speech and a sing language (i.e. bi-lingually). I’ve seen you ng children who have no real means of communication and it breaks my heart as it just doesn’t have to be that way. If you’ve got a couple of minutes, have a look at this video https://youtu.be/U8lebyetQkc then go to the cued speech website http://www.cuedspeech.co.uk/ if you’d like to find out more.
Nicholas O
May 20, 2016
Interesting comments regarding Cued Speech as a visible way to access the spoken word. In a mainstream school setting CS would allow the deaf pupils to learn in line with the rest of the class throughout their education.
Give the class the right tools and the attainment gap would close..
The class in the clip have had their awareness of deafness raised in a fun way by having sign classes. It looks like it’s being used as an introduction to a new language – as they could with French.
Anne Worsfold
May 20, 2016
Cathy is right, teaching young school children to Sign to give some basic communication with a deaf peer, is great, but it won’t solve the twin problems of how a deaf child can access and learn the language of hearing family members (without delay), and how they can access the language of education and wider society.
Andrew’s right too; Cued Speech will do that, whether its used to support hearing technology, or if it’s used bilingually with BSL.
The NDCS report on which this news item was based does not claim that BSL will solve the problem, it also refers to Cued Speech
CS is just a visual version of English, and, because it’s not a new language it can be learned quite quickly, rather like learning to type if you already can write. Parents can learn in about 20 hours so delayed language is entirely avoidable. Learning CS is also cheap and can be done via Skype or e-learning.
BTW – the deaf young woman in the video Andrew suggested watching is tri-lingual, in two ‘spoken’ languages (through CS) and sign language!
Harry
May 25, 2016
It’s still fantastic to see the children learning the sign language, so that they could actually involve the deaf children. Communication can be a barrier to the deaf children because they do not always or fully understand the English language and they cannot hear the speech very well!
Andy
May 25, 2016
@Harry Yes, Cued Speech is all about breaking down those barriers you mention as it’s easy to learn. In this video from the BBC2 series See Hear, Pearl’s friend Holly talks about how she learnt Cued Speech so that she could communicate with her friend https://youtu.be/EC6fbfD_vck (have a look at about 7 minutes in) – I think she picked it up really quicly.