Big shindig at Parliament to demand action on acoustics
Posted by Ian Noon on June 9, 2009
God, I’m glad today is over. Today, we went off to Parliament for a parliamentary event to promote our Sounds good? campaign for better acoustics in schools. The event was hosted by John Bercow MP, a respected Conservative MP, who has made it his mission to ensure that the needs of children with special educational needs are high on the political agenda.
Around 40 odd MPs turned up. It was a fantastic show of support. But it did mean that for 2 hours, I felt completely mobbed, even with a large contingent of NDCS staff on hand to help out. I’m not sure I ever want to meet a MP again.
The idea behind the event was to give MPs the opportunity to find out more about the importance of acoustics. They could do this by a) meeting some local deaf children and b) listening to a computer simulation of what a teacher’s voice in a classroom with rubbish acoustics sounds like. And they got to get their photo taken with the deaf children. The photos will be winging their way out to local media across the UK and will help us raise awareness of the campaign. We also published results of a survey of local authorities – which I’ll be blogging about soon.
Two Ministers were due to come but they got reshuffled at the last minute in the governmental game of musical chairs. Shame but the new Ministers will be hearing from us soon!
It was a great day and a culmination of a lot of campaign work to try and produce a ‘critical’ moment. Along with the survey, we hope we’ve now reached the moment where we hope that the mass of support and the case for urgent action is so compelling that the Government just gets on with it. It will be a few weeks before we can see if it’s worked.
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