Watch: Channel 4 News video showing parents who have to pay £3000 to learn BSL to communicate with their deaf children

I wish there were a dislike button at times like this. It is absolutely bloody ridiculous to charge the parents AT ALL to learn sign language when they have a Deaf child. Shame on Britain.

Finland are similar, in that when I was diagnosed as profoundly deaf, the government offered me sign language classes at the Deaf school in Helsinki… at a cost of almost 4,000€… and that was just for me. If my husband wanted to be able to communicate to me in sign language in our marriage, he would have to pay an additional 4,000€. When each of our annual incomes is just over 6,000€, it shows how truly ridiculous it is. I ended up learning ASL for free from a linguistics professor (Dr Bill Vicars) instead, and have been fighting for the past two years to have access to a speech-to-text interpreter – something they refuse since I use ASL instead of FinSL (which is irrelevant, since over 60% of Deaf don’t use sign language at all).

Governments lack brains and compassion when it comes to Deaf/hearing families.

I’m very grateful to Deaf Action in Edinburgh for a scheme that they ran for families with young Deaf children. They got funding to pay for two 10 week courses in BSL that were then followed up with a refresher course prior to paying for Level 1 tuition. Each course was attended by 10-12 families or so. Not only did we learn some basic BSL it helped us to meet other families in a similar position to ours outside of events run by NDCS. Since then our ToDs have also set up a weekly signing group for families with Deaf preschoolers

One of the problems which the channel 4 film didn’t / couldn’t highlight is that even throwing £3,000 into teaching hearing parents to sign won’t solve the problem that very young children need constant, good quality language, and hearing parents can’t, in a short time-frame, be good language models in a language they are learning – any more than I could in Chinese.

Parents can learn how to make their own speech fully visible with Cued Speech (CS) in a week or less. There is also free e-learning for the basics and low-cost one-to-one tuition through Skype. The charity, Cued Speech Association UK, has a bursary fund for parents who can’t afford to learn. So deaf children brought up with CS have access to the language of the home (just like hearing children) without delay, and they develop an understanding of the language which surrounds them in education, work and wider society.

CS works very well bilingually with BSL, so this is not an ‘either / or’ comment. Nor is it a ‘CS is better than BSL’ comment (which wold be like saying English is better than French). CS is JUST English made visible. On a practical level though, my personal observations are that, even with a huge amount of support, most parents (including myself) take years to be fluent in BSL. Consequently, if BSL is their child’s main or only language, and parents are their main language models, the children have impoverished language input – sometimes for several years – and that this impacts on their development. I feel that this is a bit of an elephant in the room!