Helping deaf children in Gambia

Another former NDCS intern is going on to big amazing things. Anton Venus, who was helping us in the campaigns team last year and generally being exceedingly helpful, is off to Gambia to work with a deaf organisation over there on a VSO project.

It’s my job to moan about provision for deaf children in the UK, but obviously to grow up deaf in some other countries is obviously much more of a challenge and I sometimes feel privileged I grew up in the UK where the provision is available, free of charge, to make sure I can strut my stuff. This is something which NDCS’s international development wing, Deaf Child Worldwide works on (helping deaf children overseas, not helping me strut my stuff obviously). So I’m very impressed by Anton’s desire to travel over to Africa to work with deaf organisations there and commitment. I’m sure he will make a huge difference.

You can check his blog out here and sponsor him too. A very worthy cause.

How deaf friendly are banks?

I had one of my angry deaf moments last week. It took me a while to work out who I was most angry with. Sainsburys Bank for swallowing my debit card? Or my own bank, First Direct, for being completely useless and deaf unfriendly? In the end, First Direct won hands down.

To my discredit, despite having moved house around a year ago, I still haven’t got a textphone for my new home. I hate using textphones anyway but that’s another story…

Not to worry, I thought. I will just email my bank. I joined First Direct because I could do everything online, so no worries.

I needed to call. Sigh… Oh well, I’ll ask my other half to interpret for me. But the first call didn’t last very long. Because for “data protection reasons”, the bank refused to take the call. I was furious. I happen to know for a fact that the Data Protection Act allows for some flexibility. But, more importantly, what about the Equality Act? What about the legal requirement to make reasonable adjustments and to show flexibility in order to meet the needs of disabled people? The bank was ill-advised to try and play legal top trumps with me, an ex-civil servant and now a campaigns officer. My fury went unabated…

The 2nd call was slightly more successful… but only after some rather terse exchanges and being left on hold for a rather long time.

The experience left me angry for 2 reasons. First, the lack of flexibility and dismal awareness of the concept of reasonable adjustments. Second, the lack of facility by which deaf people could contact the bank urgently through other means – online chat, SMS, all those fancy bits of technology that like everyone uses these days, especially deaf young people. It’s hard enough for young people to learn about finances, banking, etc. Banks don’t exactly seem to help matters for deaf young people.

A very frustrating experience. First Direct… what a load of bankers.

So you think emailing your MP is a waste of time?

Well, I think the 38 Degrees grassroots campaigning organisation have convincingly proved otherwise. After a barrage of emails and letters from angry constituents to MPs on the Government’s plans to sell off the forests, the Government decided to think again. MPs listened and they forced the Government to listen too. You could say that they finally saw the wood for the trees.

A nice little display of people power. And I must admit, I’m a big fan of 38 Degrees and always thinking of things and campaign ideas to steal from them for NDCS’s campaign work to force the Government to listen to concerns on cuts to help for deaf children. Can a little people power be exercised on this? And how can an organisation like NDCS help nudge this along besides the standard template emails for people to send to their local decision-makers?

A good day for trees.

Good news on academies and help for deaf children

Clearly this blog is very influential and being read by people at the heart of Government. Because within a fortnight of my blog about academies and deaf children, the Government took action to respond to concerns on this. Bucks Fizz all round!

The risk was that deaf children in academies wouldn’t get the help they need because of the way that the silly funding arrangements work. And that specialist support services for deaf children would lose funding.

Clearly, the Government has been listening to these concerns because yesterday they wrote to all local authorities to announce that they would be tweaking the funding arrangements so that specialist support services for children with special educational needs would not lose funding. It’s a short term, one-year, solution, pending a review of academy funding, but still a very welcome one. Here’s the NDCS story on it. A good day for deaf children.

If any Government Ministers are reading this, I also think every deaf person should be given a free I-Phone. Ahem.

Cuts watch survey – protecting services for deaf children

One of the key parts of my job – besides drinking gratuitous amounts of sugary tea – is collecting evidence to support our campaign work. And with the cuts coming, NDCS has been doing a lot of work over the past month to develop a survey using some fancy survey monkey software. No actual monkeys are involved, which is a shame, but there are a range of questions aiming to tease out from parents of deaf children across the UK:

1) Why specialist support services for deaf children are important;
2) What would happen if these services were cut; and
3) What cuts are happening already.

The results will be used in my campaigns work to lobby the purse-holders not to touch funding for specialist support services for deaf children.

The survey hasn’t been out long but nearly 500 parents have responded which is fantastic. But I’m hoping and working to get it up even higher. Maybe even up to a thousand? The more responses, the more I’ll be able to bang the results over the head of the purse-string holders until they agree that actually, yeah, it’s not a good idea to cut services for deaf children who are already among the most educationally disadvantaged kids around today.

Any bright ideas on promoting the survey to parents of deaf children much appreciated.

Watch this space for details of the survey results.