Catch 22 as NDCS challenges Government officials on acoustics

Attended a meeting at the Department for Children, Schools and Families today about acoustics. It went well… but no major breakthrough… Yet.

Some small steps are being made which bring us closer to testing acoustics in all new schools. But nothing is yet on the table that would guarantee that all schools would definitely be tested. The Department is suggesting there is no evidence that schools are failing to deliver good acoustics. This isn’t borne out by what our members are telling us. It’s also puts us in a catch-22 because if there is no testing, it is much harder to get evidence of non-compliance. And now the Department is saying it can’t introduce testing if there is no evidence of non-compliance. My head hurts from thinking about it.

There was a suggestion from round the table that it didn’t matter if the acoustics weren’t great because deaf children could use personal microphone systems. After 11 years of using microphones in schools myself, I feel confident in saying this is baloney. Microphones amplify all noises, not just the teacher’s voice. They make group work difficult. And not all deaf children use microphones anyway. It’s not to say they’re not important – but clearly they complement good acoustics. They’re not a solution to bad acoustics.

One thing that was clear from the meeting that all the letters that our supporters are writing is getting their attention and they have to spend a lot of time explaining what is going on to MPs. The more people that write in, the more it’s going to push the Government to making sure that deaf children get high quality acoustics in schools – so write in now if you haven’t already!

The Department is going to go away and think about what we’ve said, and there is a plan to meet again in around a month. In the meantime, the campaign for schools that sound good goes on!

Acoustics campaign gets endorsement boost

The sounds good? campaign for improved acoustics in schools got a bit of a boost last week when we managed to get a bunch of other organisations to sign up to a letter to the editor of the Times Educational Supplement. We were behind the letter which was signed by over ten organisations who, like us, believe that the listening environment in schools need to be treated as a greater priority.

So who signed up? One of the largest councils in the country, a leading teaching union, audiological experts and other major children’s charities. Our website has the full list.

Why go to this effort? We wanted to demonstate that acoustics isn’t just an issue that affects deaf children. It’s important for all children to be able to listen and learn effectively, as well as for teachers to be able to teach effectively. Importantly, we also wanted to demonstrate the wide consensus out there action needs to be taken to improve acoustics in schools.

The hope is that the Government will see how much support there is out there for our campaign ask of a new requirement for acoustic testing that they will get on with it.

New laws on equality

The Equality Bill has been published today. It’s a new key piece of legislation that aims to streamline all existing discrimination legislation into one document. It’s already pretty controversial and it looks like it’s going to be a hot potato for the Government going forward. I’ve already heard a rumour that one peer is already planning to do everything he can to sabotage the whole thing…

Oh, and it’s a monster Bill. Parliament have tried something new with this one by publishing the explanatory notes to the Bill alongside each clause. It’s an interesting idea. Unfortunately it means that the whole thing is well over 500 pages along and separated into two volumes. I got my daily workout just from lifting it up from the printer.

Our interest in this is mainly to make sure that disabled people don’t lose out from all this streamlining. Whilst I can see the logic, will disabiity equality get the same level of attention if it’s going to be considered alongside racial equality, gender equality and so on. How do we make sure it doesn’t become a box ticking exercise?

The Bill also contains a few clauses around accessible examinations for disabled people which we’ll be taking a close look at.

I need to get busy reading it all… Wish me luck.

Have you contacted your MP yet? Reminder no.2

When we met with Iain Wright, the Minister responsible for building regulations, earlier this week, he revealed that he had received a letter from one of his constituents about our campaign for schools that sound good.

Was that you? If so, then it was fantastically helpful. We’re sure it helped him realise that acoustics in schools is an issue that lots of people think is important – and made him more positively inclined to listen to what we had to say.

It was a great example of how people taking part in our campaigns can make a big difference. It may just be a letter or an email – but MPs do pay attention to what their constituents are saying and they do remember. Not everyone is Minister for building regulations, but MPs can, do and will make a difference.

So have you contacted your MP yet about our campaign for schools that sound good? It’s easy and only takes three minutes. Click here and our website will do all the work for you. At the time of writing, over 160 people had already contacted their MP. The more MPs we contact, the more impact we’ll have and the more likely we can change the world for deaf children. So if you haven’t already, get on with it!

The readout: NDCS meetings with Ministers and MPs

All of our scheduled meetings with the three Ministers and a MP went ahead. And we got good results from them all! I’ve allowed myself a tub of Pringles to celebrate.

Firstly, the meeting with Phil Hope and Ann Keen, Ministers at the Department for Health: they were concerned about failings in the delivery of the newborn hearing screening programme, and said they would monitor the programme carefully to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Secondly, the meeting with Iain Wright, Minister responsible for building regulations at the Department for Communities and Local Government: he seemed to be in support of the campaign and said he would work with Ministers the Department for Communities and Local Government to try and find a way to introduce acoustic testing in new school buildings.

And apparently, Iain Wright is very concerned about the impact of listening to loud music on ipods so the RNID Don’t lose the music campaign clearly has been making waves.

And thirdly, the meeting with senior Conservative MP, John Bercow, was very positive. He was happy to support our campaign on acoustics and may hopefully be hosting a parliamentary event for us…

Obviously, all of this is good but warm words in themselves don’t lead to concrete action. So we’ll be doing a lot of work on follow-up in writing various letters to the people we’ve met, setting out what was discussed and agreed and trying to push things along. But at the very least we hope, if only for a short while, we had the undivided attention of senior politicians and that they won’t forget the needs of deaf children for a while…

NDCS meetings with Ministers and MPs

I will need to get my suit out this week… We try to meet with MPs regularly to keep them informed of our campaigns but this week, the NDCS campaigns team has an unusually busy week of meetings with 3 Ministers and 1 senior MP. We may as well camp out at Westminster.

Firstly, we due to meet with Phil Hope and Ann Keen from the Department for Health to talk about our campaign on newborn hearing screening. We’re hoping the Department will set out how it will make sure that the areas which are failing to screen all babies for deafness will be brought up to speed.

Secondly, we’re meeting with Iain Wright at the Department for Communities and Local Government where we will be pressing for a new requirement for pre-completion acoustic testing as part of our Sounds good? campaign.

And thirdly, we’re meeting with senior Conservative MP John Bercow to also talk about our Sounds good? campaign on acoustics as well as some of our wider concern about support for children with special educational needs.

The meetings are a great opportunity to impress on senior decision makers our concerns and why urgent action to help deaf children is needed. A lot of work obviously goes into preparing for these kinds of meetings and one of my responsibilities as a campaigns officer is to make sure we make the most out of these opportunities. Pre-meetings are held here to discuss what points we want to raise and briefing documents are written so that all the relevant background information is available to hand.

My fear is that one or more of these meetings will get postponed at the last minute which is depressingly common given the hectic lives that Ministers and MPs lead… But here’s hoping the meetings all go ahead and we make some progress this week in our campaign work for deaf children. At least enough to justify the dry cleaning bill for my suit…

MPs debate deaf children and the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

MPs have now gone through the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning (ASCL) Bill, line by line, and considered all of the amendments. Such was their determination to do it, they ended up staying up in Parliament until well past midnight. This left me with an image of MPs sitting in a room with their pyjamas, clutching hot water bottles and teddy bears, but anyhow…

NDCS concerns got raised a few times which we were pleased with. Anything that raises the needs of deaf children within Parliament is always good news. Here’s a very brief run down of what was said:

1) Teacher training. We want the Government to give teachers an explicit entitlement to training if a child with special educational needs enters the classroom. Currently, it’s proposed that all employers will have the right to request training. We think teachers need to be proactively encouraged and enabled to take up training to work with children with special educational needs – and given a clear entitlement to this.

The Government made some positive noises about ongoing efforts to improve teacher training so that teachers know how to work with children with SEN. But no new rights. So we’ll continue to lobby on this.

2) Ofsted. We wanted an amendment that would make sure that a school couldn’t be given a ranking of good or outstanding unless provision for children with special educational needs is also good or outstanding. The Minister said it would be “highly unlikely” if this happened. This in itself was helpful and gives us something to hold the Government to account to. But then again, we were left wondering that if it will be highly unlikely, why not make it completely impossible? So again, we’ll be continuing to lobby the Government on this.

3) Acoustics. We again made our call for pre-completion acoustic testing to be required in all schools. Here, we were disappointed by the Government’s response which pretty much said that a review was ongoing. It didn’t really respond to any of the concerns raised and didn’t take us any further forward. You can guess what we’ll be doing next.

There was also a bit of debate over apprenticeships and disabled people which I’ll come back to another time as we’ve had some interesting correspondence with Government officials on this.

So when will we get to do some more lobbying? The Bill will soon have its third reading in the House of Commons where MPs basically tie up loose ends. Then it will be the turn of the House of Lords to look at the Bill. The plan is to engage with and brief peers on our concerns on the Bill in the aim of making improvements to benefit deaf children.

NDCS supports call for action on inclusion

As well as being an opportunity to eat lots of easter eggs, Easter is traditionally the time of the year when teachers get together for their various conferences. The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Woman Teachers or NASUWT have been busy this week debating the difficulties teachers face in making inclusion of children with special educational needs a reality in the classroom.

This chimes with much of our campaign work to Close the Gap in how deaf children do at school compared to their hearing friends. So we issued a press statement in support. And here is what we said:

“The National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) is supporting the NASUWT’s call for action on inclusion. NDCS believes all deaf children have a right to an education that makes them feel fully included in the life of the school and ensures that they make the same educational progress as their hearing peers. To achieve this, a continuum of provision is needed to ensure that the education service meets the needs of all deaf children. Too often, this is not available and children are expected to adapt without the support they need. As a result deaf children continue to under achieve – deaf children were 41% less likely to achieve 5 GCSEs at grades A* to C, including. English and Maths, in 2007.

A significant number of parents regularly contact the National Deaf Children’s Society with concerns that their child is not receiving his or her entitlement to appropriate education. When we investigate, we often find frontline classroom teachers trying their best in very difficult circumstances without the required support and advice to meet the pupil’s needs.

Teacher’s need more support. When a child with special educational needs enters the classroom, teachers should automatically be given training, access to qualified specialist support and guidance on how to adapt the curriculum for their needs.

We support NASUWT’s call that inclusion needs to be addressed. Government and local authorities need to take action to ensure that inclusion is a reality for all deaf children.”

There you have it. I’m now going to go back to wondering how to pronounce NASUWT…

Shameless deaf character says goodbye

So the deaf character on Shameless said farewell last night in typical Shameless fashion – by bludgeoning his Dad to death. I guess it just goes to show that deaf people can be troubled psychotic murderers too though maybe I won’t try and add that to NDCS’s key messages.

So that now’s he gone, what did we think? Some thoughts from me:

1) Without falling into the trap of assuming that a deaf character isn’t “properly” deaf because he/she isn’t deaf ‘”like me”, there was a few bits where Danny seemed to be able to follow what other people were saying with relative ease. I find it impossible to lipread people unless they’re arms length away and I can see their whole face. Danny seemed to be able to do it whilst a nose length away. I think they could have expanded on the communication barriers deaf young people face, but Shameless is a drama, not an educational programme.
2) The jokes around swear words in sign language were all too predictable.
3) It was disappointing he wasn’t on screen that much. But when he was, he was shown integrating well with the various Shameless locals and modifying his style of communication. In last night’s episode, it was revealed he could actually speak, but only when he needed/wanted to. He was a very likable character (apart from the bludgeoning his Dad bit but, in his defence, he did have his reasons).

It was a great performance by Louis Kissaun, who is still 16 and attends Mary Hare school for the deaf. One of my female friends has suggested he has definite heart-throb potential. Hopefully, we’ll see more of him in the future.

And it was great to see a deaf role model, insofar anyone on Shameless can be described as a role model. Admittedly, I’m not sure I’d want young children to be watching Shameless. But I can safely say it’s the kind of thing I would probably have watched when I was 14 so I’m sure there were lots of deaf young people watching it last night. It may have been the first time that many of them saw a leading deaf character on a major TV programme the first time. Who knows, it may have inspired a few to try acting themselves…

And finally hats off to Channel 4. Here’s hoping, they will continue to show a range of deaf characters on the telly.

Anyhow, what did you think?

Have you contacted your MP yet? Reminder #1

I mentioned that we’ve launched a call for action from our members and supporters to contact their MP to call for action on acoustics in schools. Our website is magic and makes it really easy to do this. Have you done it yet?

Don’t have time? It really won’t take more than five minutes. You could do in the advert break between Coronation Street. And it’s Easter so I’m sure you can spare five minutes away from eating easter eggs.

Don’t know who your MP is? Just tell us your postcode and we’ll work it out for you.

Don’t know what to say? Well, lucky for you we’ve written a template message for you. It will come up on screen once you’ve told us your details.

Think it’s all pointless? Absolutely not. The more pressure we put on the Government, the more likely they will take action to help deaf children.

So if you believe that schools in the UK need to be fully inclusive for deaf children, then please contact your MP.

Click here to make a difference.

Thank you and a have a good Easter!