How to improve parental confidence in the education system?

That’s the question the Lamb Inquiry is currently looking at since last year after being asked by the Government to hold an inquiry on the special educational needs (SEN) system and why so many parents feel like they have to wage war to get support for their child.

We’ve been feeding in some informal thoughts but now NDCS is going to be producing a formal response which I’m currently working on. I spent much of today in a meeting with one of my colleagues to find out more about what parents of deaf children have fed back to us over the years. And one big issue that comes up time and time again is the process of how a child comes to get a statement, which sets out their entitlements to support at school, and how the SEN Code of Practice is followed in practice.

Some of the key points that seem to be emerging include:

* Lots of statements tend to be vague about a deaf child’s needs and what impact deafness has on their daily life. This makes it difficult to then specify what support is needed on a practical basis.

* Local authorities are often very reluctant to specify exactly what support the child needs / will get. For example, it might say that the child should have access to a communication support worker. But it won’t say how often or what skills the communication support worker should have. Some local authorities apparently have a policy of never being too specific on statements to avoid having to make commitments they made not be able to afford.

* Annual reviews of the statement sometimes seem to be just a talking shop. Parents are sometimes not provided with the necessary papers beforehand. Others find the meetings intimidating. Children’s views are not always sought. And perhaps worse, if a child’s objectives are not met, a few parents report that last year’s objectives are just copied and pasted into next year’s objectives, rather than using the annual review as an opportunity to problem solve why the objectives have not been met and work out what other support is needed.

One Family Officer said that in all her years of supporting parents on statements, she had “not come across one OK, let alone good, statement”.

What do you think? If you’re a parent of a deaf child, what have you been your experiences of the statementing system? What needs to be done to improve things? I’ll factor in any thoughts into the formal response.

Sweyne Park School: where you can hear yourself think

I’ve just got back from a fascinating visit to Sweyne Park school in Essex. It’s a school with a large unit for mostly profoundly deaf children and which has been at the centre of some ground-breaking research into acoustics in schools.

The history is that the local authority was finding that too many parents of deaf children were citing poor acoustics as a reason for demanding the local authority for their children to be educated elsewhere. So Sweyne Park took part in a scientific experiment where individual classrooms where either given superior acoustics, or just met the government’s standards or were left untreated as a control group, with a view to improving acoustics over the longer-term.

While we wait for the research to be published, we decided to go and see and hear the classrooms for ourselves. It was a revelation. The classroom with acoustics that go beyond what the Government requires was incredibly quiet and calm – even though there were several one to one discussions going on in the classroom. It was as if background noise and babble was being sucked out of the room. I could almost literally hear myself think.

The classroom that just meets government standards was just about OK but the children’s voices were more audibly lingering around the classroom.

The ‘control’ classroom was very noisy. When I entered, I felt like I was enveloped by a wave of sound. Group discussions were going on and the children were talking louder and louder over each other to be heard. A communication support worker told me he found it more difficult to support deaf children in such classrooms.

The teachers had nothing but positive feedback about the new classrooms – that they didn’t have to shout anymore to strain their voices and that it was easier to manage the classroom. It was strange for me, but I personally felt myself tensing up just going into the noisy classroom whilst I felt quite relaxed and calm in the first classroom.

Our campaign position up to now has been that focused on getting the Government to make sure that all new classrooms met the existing standards. Having visited this school, I’m now wondering if we need to start arguing more for the standards to be upwardly revised…

New strategy paper on education: what does it mean for deaf children?

The Department for Children, Schools and Families love to strategise. If I had a Krispy Kreme doughnut for every strategy paper that’s been published since I started this job, I would probably now be auditioning for the role of Jabba the Hutt in the next Star Wars film.

Their latest strategy paper is called: Your child, your schools, our future: building a 21st century school system. It’s a white paper, meaning that it’s a statement of intention to make lots of new laws in this area, probably later this year.

I read all through this morning and it was quite interesting. Critics will say it’s a desperate last gasp of a Government that’s running out of ideas, but I thought there was lots of sensible, useful stuff in it and a handful of references to the needs of children with special educational needs.

For example, pupils will now have a legal ‘guarantee‘ of what they will get out of school. It includes the right to additional support if children are falling behind. Assuming people are aware of it and that the guarantee has real legal teeth, it could be a useful lever to empower deaf children and their families to get the support they need.

There’s also a proposal that local authorities should survey parents to make sure they’re happy with the choice of schools in their area. Again, could be a powerful way of empowering parents of deaf children where suitable provision locally for deaf kids is not great.

A few concerns though. The white paper talks a lot of encouraging schools to work together and collaborate more to meet each other’s needs, with less centralised support from Westminster. Schools will also have more control over their own funding. This is fine – but we will need to make sure that schools don’t forget about children with low incidence needs, such as deaf children, and still make sure these children get the support they need. The white paper itself acknowledges there will still be a need for some centralised support services. We’ll be reminding them of this when it comes to sensory support services. We’ll also be reminding them of the ongoing need for action to close the gap in attainment for deaf children.

As always, the devil will be in the detail. And I need to find it, in true “Where’s Wally?” style.

What did you think? Is it good news for deaf children or do you think more needs to be done?

Cinema access website up for top award

Fresh from winning a People’s Choice award, Dean Rhodes-Brandon, the pioneer behind Your Local Cinema.com website are up for yet another award. This is one is a National Lottery Award for Best Arts Project.

It would be great if they win. So if you want to help make it happen, you can vote online and / or you can call 0844 686 8020. It costs around 5p from a BT phone line and it’s an automated phone line, so you can hang up after 10 seconds without saying anything.

Votes must be in by the 10th July. So get voting!

New sign language project launches

Back in February 2008, Malcolm Bruce MP, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Deafness in Westminster, asked Gordon Brown during Prime Minister’s Questions about support for sign language users. Fast forward to today and a consortium of deaf organisations were formally launching the I-sign project and celebrating £800,000 of investment from the Department for Children, Schools and Families to undergo work to raise the status of sign language in England.

I think the i-sign project is a really important and innovative project. It’s been going since early this year and brings together various strands of work which different organisations are leading on, including NDCS, BDA, Signature, RNID and others. NDCS is leading on developing a family sign language website to help families of deaf children learn useful signs for engaging with their deaf child. And we’re taking a close interest in the work being undertaken by Signature to develop a qualifications framework for communication support workers. It’s a two year project with ambitions to become self-sustaining. It’s quite refreshing to see different deaf organisations joining forces in this way.

The new Minister for special educational needs, Diana Johnson came along to the event to lend her support and meet some families of deaf children. She was quoted as saying:

“Overcoming the communication barriers experienced by deaf children is key to ensuring they get the best education possible. The Government is committed to providing parents and the school workforce the communication support they need to ensure deaf children fulfil their potential. I am delighted that we are funding such an innovative and exciting project. Developing qualifications for teachers and providing interactive materials for parents to learn sign language will help deaf children communicate effectively both at home and at school.”

And our deaf work experience student, Paul, ended up giving a short speech in front of the Minister about his own experiences growing up as a sign language user. Probably not what he expected when he joined NDCS for the summer – but we like to keep our interns on their toes…

Overall, a good day for deaf children.

Will deaf people be able to access government scheme on apprenticeships?

I popped along to the Houses of Parliament yesterday – as you do – to a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Disability. This is a group of MPs and peers with a stated interest in disability issues who hold meetings once in a while. Yesterday’s meeting was on the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill, a hefty piece of legislation that is now making its way through the House of Lords.

Lots of Lords and Ladies came, including Lord Young, who is the Government’s spokesperson on apprenticeships in the Lords. He was challenged on the issue of entry requirements for apprenticeships. The Government is creating a new scheme whereby it will guarantee young people an apprentice if they meet certain requirements.

Unfortunately for deaf young people, these certain requirements include GCSEs in English and Maths. Putting to one side the issue of whether deaf children get the right support to be able to fulfill their potential and achieve these GCSEs, is a deaf person whose first language is British Sign Language necessarily going to get or want a GCSE in English?

And yet the scheme seemingly excludes them, ignoring the fact that deaf young people will be able to make use of interpreters, communication support, etc. in an apprenticeship, as in any other job.

I was hoping that Lord Young might stand up and cry out “now that’s what I call discrimination” but instead, he made some warm words about the need to support disabled young people. But he also taked about the need to “strike a balance” and ensure that apprenticeships are “useful” to employers. So it doesn’t seem likely that the Government will abandon the principle of entry requirements anytime soon.

But we don’t plan to shut up about it, and will be continuing to press for these entry requirements to be relaxed for people with disabilities. So watch this space.

Deaf and disabled children denied access to basic NHS care

Every Disabled Child Matters (EDCM) have launched an important new campaign today about disabled children’s access to health services.

We know that many professionals work their socks off to help disabled children. But EDCM’s report still makes for depressing reading, particular about the cavalier attitudes of some other professionals to the needs of children with complex health needs. In one example given, a disabled child was left to die and spoken of as if she wasn’t ever really alive at all.

Like other disabled children, deaf children spend a lot of their time at hospitals, particularly in audiology departments. It’s important that all health professionals are child-friendly and have the right levels of deaf awareness to be able to engage effectively with these children.

And a large number of children – around 40% – also have additional needs, of which many will have complex needs. It’s important that their rights to effective hearing aids and audiological equipment isn’t overlooked.

NDCS is supporting the campaign and joining the call for primary care trusts to improve the services they offer to disabled children.

Support for deaf children post 16

I got an email earlier this week from a father of a deaf son, offering to act as a case study for NDCS campaigns. Case studies like this really help us demonstrate the case for action and help make our campaign asks more personal and real.

As a campaigns officer, I come across lots of examples of how deaf children and young people have been let down. But this was a pretty upsetting email to read:

“I am writing as a parent of a deaf teenager who is coming to the end of his A levels at 6th form. My son who has a severe to profound loss was well supported at his secondary school but when he moved on to do A levels it was a disaster. The local Hearing Impaired Service informed us that they covered the 6th form college he was to attend (his secondary school had no 6th form so he had to move on). However, once at the 6th form he was given 1 visit per term (20 minute chat with a teacher for the deaf). When I asked for support with issues of educational concern I was given the message that there was no one designated member of staff for my son as he was an older student and that the focus for their service was with the younger ones. They went on to say that the older students should be able to advocate for themselves by this stage. My son had been given a separate room for his GCSE’s at school and a support assistant in the class to ensure he had understood and got the correct notes he needed in class. At A level he had nothing. The 6th Form even put him in the main exam hall during the first round of exams in the first year with all students and he was told to take his hearing aids out during the exams as the feedback noise might disturb other students. I informed the Hearing Impaired Service of this and they were concerned but felt that this was something that I as a parent should really sort out for my son, if he could not do it himself. They eventually came over to see the SENCO and my son was given a separate room for his exams 6 months later in the summer of the first year (his results for the Janaury exams were really bad but the Hearing Impaired Service did not even ask). In the second year of sixth form when I asked the Hearing Impaired Service to check that my son would be given the correct support during his exams the Hearing Impaired Service (manager) evetually rang to instruct me to do this work as her staff were busy with the younger students and reiterated that this was something I should do and that her staff were really not responsible. I was extremely disappointed by this attitude.

Given my son’s experience of A levels I can well understand that deaf young people find it hard to keep up with their peers. I have had to spend a lot of money on private tutors to give my son the extra support to keep up and follow the courses he has chosen. He has lost all confidence in his abilities educationally and this is very upsetting as he did well in his GCSEs and felt as though he could achieve anything.”

Support for deaf young people who go to further education colleges is clearly an issue we need to take a closer look at.

What did you think of the above case study? Have you come across similar experiences?

What does the Government think of our acoustics campaign?

So whathas the Government’s response been to our campaign on acoustics in schools?

Well, some of it is probably unprintable. I’m fairly certain that officials would wish we would just go away. Our campaign has generated a fair amount of work for them. I feel their pain as an ex-civil servant myself. But then again, it wouldn’t take much for us to go away.

The campaign is calling for a new mandatory requirement that all new school buildings be tested for their acoustics. Some of the arguments deployed by the Government to try and justify not doing this have included:

1) A government review is already strengthening guidance on acoustics. Which is very welcome. However, we’ve already been told that the review will simply strengthen the recommendation that acoustic testing should be done. It won’t make it a requirement. We have evidence that a lot of local authorities currently don’t bother to test the quality of acoustics as it is ‘only’ a recommendation. So this won’t work.

2) Most new secondary schools are now being built through a programme known as Building Schools for the Future. For these schools, it has been proposed that testing will be a ‘condition of contract’ in a draft contract that all local authorities will be expected to sign. Again, this is very welcome. But, again, there is a but. It’s essentially a draft contract. It does not guarantee that all local authorities will use it. And it would only apply to secondary schools. Lots of new primary schools are also being built at the moment. They need to have high quality acoustics too to ensure effective language development.

3) It’s been proposed that more be done to educate the educationalists. I’ve never been entirely sure what educationalists do – but I gather it’s their job to decide how schools should be run and designed. Educationalists currently seem to be in a lather about open plan teaching spaces without having really thought about how good acoustics can be made possible in such environments. Again, this is welcome. But this should be happening anyway and I don’t think it takes away the need for acoustic testing.

I think it’s quite simple really. If government standards have been set, the Government needs to make sure they’re met. And the best, and only, way to do that is to have a hard requirement for new schools to be tested for their acoustics.

It’s not particularly expensive to do. We estimate it costs around 0.01% of the cost of new secondary school.

It’s a small thing to do that would make a big difference. And it’s a sure fire means of making the campaign go away!

Musical chairs as Government reshuffles

For political geeks like me, the last two weeks have been fascinating. How many Ministers would abandon ship? Would we have a new Prime Minister? Would the Government just implode and leave a massive cleaning bill behind?

Well, now the dust has settled, we can see who is left standing. And once again, the musical chairs reshuffle of Government Ministers means we have a few new faces in NDCS’s key departments of interest.

Perhaps the key one is at the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). Sarah McCarthy-Fry, who was the lead Minister responsible for special educational needs, has gone. Replacing her is Diana Johnson. Who, to be honest, I don’t know very much about though I need to find out quickly.

I can see the rationale for fresh blood. But it has been less than a year since the last injection of fresh blood. And now we have a period of uncertainty as we wait for the new Minister to get up to speed. And we have also have to start again with briefing the new Minister with details of NDCS, what we’re about and what we’d like from the Government. Just like we did less than a year ago. It’s like a Governmental Groundhog Day.

Perhaps the biggest pain of all is that a meeting between ministers at DCSF and the Department for Communities and Local Government that was due to take place next week and at which we were hoping to make a breakthrough on our acoustics campaign has now been postponed. The biggest irony of all? The two ministers in question have swapped over to each other’s departments.

Obviously, Government shouldn’t be run according to what’s convenient to campaigners like me. But I can’t help thinking, does this annual rejuvenation make for good Government? I’m not so sure.