Deaf Awareness Week in Wales

Image courtesy of NDCS

Deaf Awareness Week is being celebrated across the UK and over in Wales, NDCS Cymru has been busy asking lots of young deaf children to draw up images of their own deaf awareness and communication tips. The end result is a rather snazzy poster, which is now being sent out to every school in Wales. Hopefully, teachers will put the posters up so that they and pupils alike can see for themselves what matters for deaf children.

You can also see their images via a special slideshow on the NDCS website.

It’s great to see that so many deaf children in Wales got involved, and gave their own views and tips and NDCS will be showing these tips to MPs at a special deaf awareness week reception tomorrow. If you’d like NDCS to mention any good deaf awareness / communication tips you might have, then please send these in – you can either email them to campaigns@ndcs.org.uk, tweet us or leave a comment below. Keep them coming!

Happy Deaf Awareness Week!

Image courtesy of NDCS

Well, first day of Deaf Awareness Week 2010 is now over. The National Deaf Children’s Society has launched an appeal for the best deaf awareness tips on its website, Twitter and Facebook and already some really good ones have been rolling in, such as:

* DO make the most of technology to help communication. For example, if you’ve got a mobile phone and struggling to be understood, write out what you want to say as a text message and show it to the child
* Don’t be scared to try fingerspelling and signing. BSL users are human too! My son is a BSLer and doesn’t speak, we have spent a lot of money trying to communicate with our son which seems morally wrong.
* Hearing aids (& implants) are not a cure for deafness, the child is still deaf!
* Tip from my deaf son. If you need to get their attention, just touch lightly on the arm. Don’t poke or grab, he hates this.

Do you agree with the above? Have you got any of your own? NDCS is going to be sharing these tips with MPs at a parliamentary reception on Wednesday, so please keep them coming in.

PS If you’re on Twitter, don’t forget to add the Deaf Awareness Week twibbon to your account and get involved by using the hashtag #deafawarenessweek. As well as through this blog, you can regular updates by following NDCS_UK on Twitter.

The calm before Deaf Awareness Week

Next week is going to be all about me. And the other 8,999,999 people who are deaf or hard of hearing in the UK.

Yes, it’s Deaf Awareness Week and this year’s theme is “Look at me”. The idea is to talk about simple deaf awareness tips throughout the week – like facing deaf people when you talk. And, of course, by looking at deaf people, you can finally find out one way or another whether deafness really is an invisible disability.

I’ve been busy at the National Deaf Children’s Society gearing up for it. The main focus of our work is a parliamentary reception next week where deaf children and young people will be part of a group educating and testing MPs on their deaf awareness. NDCS is joining forces with RNID and the UK Council of Deafness for the event.

For NDCS, the whole thing is a follow-up from the NDCS election pledge work. 223 MPs committed to making deaf children matter. Now is their opportunity to find out how.

I’ll be blogging throughout Deaf Awareness Week about what’s going on, and NDCS will also be encouraging supporters to get involved. So watch this space.

In the meantime, what are you up to for Deaf Awareness Week? Leave a comment below to let us know.

PS You can also get the latest via the NDCS UK twitter account – so get tweeting!

Academies: good or bad news for deaf children?

The Queen was dragged away from her TV last week to come and open Parliament for the new Government and to read a speech written for her by the Government on new laws coming through. I wonder if one day the Queen will just say “read your own speech, I want to watch Loose Women” but that day hasn’t arrived yet.

One of the new laws she announced was the Academies Bill. Academies are a type of school which are independent of the local council. They were popularised by Tony Blair and there are now over 200 of them. The new Government wants to oversee a massive expansion of the programme.

I can see some of the pros of the proposal. Why not allow headteachers and teachers to run their own school themselves; they themselves know their own pupils best, rather than some local council bureaucrat. It’s not as if local councils have been a complete success at improving the educational attainment of disadvantaged children.

On the other hand, there some real uncertainty about specialist services for deaf children. The problem is that this is usually provided and funded by local councils. If academies are independent of local councils, the councils will have less money for these kinds of specialist support services for deaf children. Academies would have to pay for it as an extra cost. But most academies may only have one deaf child; the cost of high quality expert specialist support may be proportionally very expensive unless you have lots of academies pooling their resources. So will deaf children in academies get the support they need?

The other concern is that, in a desire to give academies more freedoms, it’s unclear whether some laws on special educational needs are being followed. For example, non-academies have to make sure that their special educational needs co-ordinators are qualified teachers. The same law doesn’t apply to academies.

The National Deaf Children’s Society will be flagging up these concerns with politicians as they debate the Academies Bill. But since there are relatively few Academies already in operation, there is a lack of information over how deaf children already in academies are getting on at the moment. Is it good, OK or bad?

If you know of any deaf children, let us know how they’re getting on by leaving a comment below or emailing campaigns@ndcs.org.uk.