Interview: British Deaf Association CEO Rebecca Mansell on the BSL Conference, a ‘Deaf movement’ and more

After setting out her charity’s draft, 10-year strategic vision for ‘protecting and promoting’ British Sign Language (BSL) at the British Deaf Association’s first BSL Conference, CEO Rebecca Mansell sat down with The Limping Chicken’s Liam O’Dell to talk more about what the plan entails.

Their conversation also included the relationship between a person’s Deaf and disabled identities, the closure of sign language qualifications body iBSL, and more.

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First of all, first inaugural BDA BSL conference. What are you really hoping will come out of this event and the one big aim or objective from gathering the community today?

So one big thing that I’m aiming for today is to bring together the public sector, the Deaf organisations, and members, bringing all these areas together. So I want the public sector to listen to Deaf people, their lived experience growing up of using sign language, and experiencing barriers. It’s really important with any design, any shaping of service or policy, should be done with Deaf people. For so long, they’ve been ignoring Deaf people. Deaf people have been left behind and the barriers have still been going on.

We have the BSL Act now. We have our language legally recognised. So it’s time to put those people to one side, to listen to the community. A really good example of this is in Scotland, they’re doing exactly that. That’s inspirational. We want to aim for that – we want that here – so forward, they need to listen to us.

One of the things that you did in the first session, or just now in your talk, was talking about the BDA strategic vision. Obviously that’s still a draft at this stage, that’s still a work in progress. But for those that are members of the deaf community that are not signers, but maybe might be interested or are oral deaf that obviously want to connect with the community, and the wider culture. How do you see them getting involved in the strategic vision of the BDA?

That’s a fantastic question, Liam. I love that. In the presentation I talked about five key areas, so key groups of people that we need to work with in order to take BSL forward. So out of those five, one of them was the BSL allies, that’s what I’d be asking from these people: to become a BSL ally. It doesn’t matter if you’re deaf or hard of hearing, if you sign, if you don’t sign. These people need to come and work with us and that’s what we want.

One lady to spoke to me. It really impacted me from her words. She said she grew up without any sign language. She had a cochlear implant, she could hear quite well and had good speech, but she just felt something was missing. It was some kind of loss that she couldn’t quite describe. Then one day when she was feeling really low, she really didn’t know what was wrong, so she started doing some research. Then she realised, out there, there was access to a Deaf community.

She stumbled upon the Great Britain Deaf Football Team. She was a really good football player, but she struggled with barriers to get into the mainstream teams. So she made contact with Deaf GB football, and managed to get into the team. She’s absolutely excelled at the sport, and now she’s taken on sign language because of networking with the team. So she’s like, ‘why didn’t I grow up with this language? Why was I deprived of British Sign Language?’

I think she feels strongly about that, and it’s really interesting. It’s really important to reach out to everyone. Everyone is very welcome, because together we are stronger, we are better and we can change for the next generation.

I had a quick look at the draft strategic plan in amongst all of the amazing speakers we’ve heard already in this in this conference. It talks about a review of the Accessible Information Standard – specifically related to the NHS.

In addition to that review, does the BDA hope that there will actually be a greater legal enforcement of the Accessible Information Standard, something I know SignHealth has also been working quite a lot on, as well?

Absolutely right. It says in the strategy, our work that we’re already doing is going to be supported with the AIS. We don’t want to take over the work or duplicate it; the aim is to really bring together 50 years worth of research. So the Deaf community, Deaf academics, they’ve been campaigning and trying to influence the Government for years, but it’s come out in dribs and drabs. It’s standalone research – that just won’t do. We need to bring all this research together into one document, that’s what the strategy talks about.

So from birth, every stage of our lives, we want to include evidence to backup all of this – so 50 years worth of research in one paper. I think people will read it and think, ‘gosh, the barriers all the way from birth to end-of-life’, and that is the reality. That needs to stop. It needs to be changed.

We want a good quality of life all the way through from birth to end-of-life, from education to health care, access and beyond. We want to work with SignHealth to look at the Scottish Government, the example they’ve set with the NHS 24. They’re doing really really well. So together, with influence from them, and with leadership from our members, we’ve got the key. We’ve got the key to the Deaf community, to say listen to them.

We can combine to make a strong voice and to bring forward transformative change.

Something that seems to be at the real heart of the BDA, in terms of this new strategic vision but just also throughout its history, is around Deaf people having ownership of BSL, and having ownership of their own language and less hearing people taking ownership of a language that doesn’t exactly belong to them.

I just wanted to get your thoughts on obviously the recent news that iBSL, which was the only Deaf provider or Deaf-led provider of British Sign Language courses, are having to surrender its practice and eventually close down and cease trading. What does the BDA make of that news and what is it now hoping will change as a result of this and what would they like to see?

It’s a very, very sad event. I haven’t had the opportunity to look into exactly what happened so I can’t really comment, but the BDA actually set up iBSL. They then disjointed and left them to their practice, but it’s such a disappointment that a part of the BDA legacy has now shut down. Apart from that, there’s not much more I know, but it’s extremely sad.

In the strategy again, just as a quick look, it talks about rallying against organisations that seek to restrict access to British Sign Language or kind of advocate for language deprivation? Which organisations are you referring to there?

So I’m not going to name specific organisations, however, it’s the system itself, I will say. That’s basically it, what’s been built around the medical model of deafness. It’s been implemented, it’s been like this for hundreds and hundreds of years – that has to change. We need to move across to a bilingual model, a social model of deafness.

It’s not criticising it; it’s towards the aims of our vision in 10 years’ time with regards to institutional oppression of our language historically. We need to change the frameworks and the policy that allow this to happen. How do we do this? We work with organisations in order to set a base implementation of sign language.

So we want to influence change in attitudes and attitudes certainly are changing and that’s brilliant, but we’ve got a long way to go.

Rebecca Mansell, CEO of @BDA_Deaf, is now taking to the stage. She begins by remembering the BSL Act Now! rally in Parliament Square one year ago. #BSLConf pic.twitter.com/p6eZGvQMXW

— Liam O'Dell (@LiamODellUK) March 17, 2023

It’s really quite striking… a pull-out quote for me from what you said in your in your speech, around creating a Deaf civil rights movement, and a Deaf movement that united around this aim of championing BSL.

You said it there about like the Deaf social model of disability. Obviously, the wider disability community subscribes to the social model, and when we look at disability and deafness, sometimes you hear people use the term ‘deaf and disabled’ – almost like they’re two separate things. Some people see deafness as a disability and part of their identity.

As you look at this idea of a Deaf civil rights movement and the Deaf social model, how do you see people’s Deaf identity connecting with the wider disability identity?

Yeah, you’re absolutely right there. There’s been a lot of overlap. So we are in this area, but we’re not quite in this area – a lot of fragmented ideology there. I think what we can do together with our members – especially with people like yourselves, the wider community – we need to do this together.

We are, in the medical perspective, lacking of hearing, but we have a language. We have a minority language, we are a minority language culture.

We want to embrace our naturally formed language of Deaf people. I think hearing people find it quite hard to understand that. They think, ‘Oh, we can make them hear through medical intervention and cochlear implants, hearing aids, but they won’t always work for everybody. At the end of the day, a Deaf person is still Deaf.

So the Deaf element is there, yes, within the disability movement, so working with disability rights movement within that perspective. So within that perspective, Deaf people, I suppose, are ideologically disabled, but the language aspect is truly unique, so that’s why we are in both areas – and I don’t think that’s a bad thing to maybe combine those together.

Also, I think the Deaf community themselves, they see their deafness as an identity, as their culture, first and foremost. We need to creatively work together to represent and promote, so people see this deafness, they realise sign language is a better method of communication, understanding what it means with regard to Deaf culture and identity. We need to educate the public, and I think from that, change will happen over time. But we still need the disability allies on our side as well, to help us achieve and move forward towards our vision.

The final question I have here this is similar to that. Again, back to the strategic vision, it talks about looking at the Department for Work and Pensions. At the moment, obviously, we have the Disability Confident scheme, which is all about inclusive employers that are welcoming and understanding of disability. You advocate for something on top of that, which is the BSL Confident scheme.

Why are you advocating for something new as opposed to an improvement on the existing Disability Confident scheme and bringing that into it? Looking from a business perspective, some businesses might say, ‘why is this another tick box exercise for me to do, rather than add it to what’s already there for me in the Disability Confident scheme?

Yeah, you’re right there. Like I said, we’ll set up a Member Forum in order to talk about our action plan, so feedback like that is brilliant. We’re very happy to take that on board – very good points that are happy to be included in discussion. I think the word disability could maybe be changed, or I don’t know, something that we can decide together and design together for sure.

With thanks to Stephanie Raper for providing British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation for this interview.

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Photo: British Deaf Association/Instagram.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is an award-winning Deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.