New data about deaf children published

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A few weeks back, the Department for Children, Schools and Families published a report with lots of data about children with special educational needs. For a geek like me, it was a dream come true. Pages and pages of spreadsheets and percentages and important footnotes to pore over. Sigh…

Anyhow, the report had its origins in the Special Educational Needs (Information) Act 2008. Sharon Hodgson MP pushed hard for this and NDCS was among a group of charities lobbying hard for it. The Act aims to shine a spotlight on special educational needs in the hope of galvanising Government to take action to improve outcomes. The report brings together lots of information for the first time on children who have been formally recognised as having a special educational need (i.e those who have a formal statement of need or who have been placed at ’school action plus’ and are getting extra help that way). So it doesn’t include information on all deaf children, and needs to be used with caution, etc. but what information it does have makes for fascinating reading (assuming you’re a geek like me). And also depressing, when you see the full extent of the poorer outcomes that deaf children experience.

A few of the interesting statistics that I’ve picked up so far include…

* In 2009, there were 14,770 deaf children formally identified as needing support. 500 more than last year.

* There are more boys recorded as having a hearing impairment: 7670 boys to 7100 girls.

* More analysis needed but it appears that children from an Asian background are more likely to have a hearing impairment. Of all Asian children with a statement, 7.8% were hearing impaired, compared to 2.5% for white children with a statement.

* The number of deaf children recorded drops dramatically at the age of 16. At age 15, there are 570 children with a hearing impairment with statements, dropping to 240 at age 16. We’re left wondering what happens to these children; whether they leave school, continue in further education with support or cease to receive any support at all.

* 4.9% of deaf children recorded are likely were defined as persistent absentees in 2007-08, compared to 2.4% of children with no identified need. Deaf girls are more likely to be defined as persistent absentees than deaf boys.

And that’s just for starters. Much of the data raises more questions than it answers. But this is not necessarily a bad thing before – the lack of any data before meant that we didn’t know what questions we needed to be asking.

I’m off on holiday next week – don’t worry, I won’t be taking the spreadsheets with me for holiday reading – but am looking forward to looking through the data in more detail and getting a full report on NDCS’s website. In the meantime, what do you think of the data so far? Anything surprising or particularly shocking in there? Anything missing you really want to know?

Data on how deaf children are doing at school – now out

Last week, while I was sunning myself on holiday, NDCS published the data given to us by the Department for Children, Schools and Families on how deaf children do in their GCSEs in England in 2008. They don’t make for pleasant reading:

Only 28% of deaf children got five GCSEs at grades A* to C (including English and Maths) compared to 48% of all children. Put in another way, nearly three quarters of deaf children leave secondary school having failed to hit the Government’s expected benchmark of success.

27% of deaf children hit the same benchmark in 2007, so deaf children are doing slightly better. However, all children are doing better too. As a result, the attainment gap between deaf children and all children has widened between 2007 and 2008. When we do the number crunching, we see that in 2008, deaf children were 42% less likely to as well in their GCSEs than all children.

Given that deafness is not a learning disability, 42% is a pretty big attainment gap. We’ll be doing some media work to highlight this gap and to support our ongoing campaign to close the gap.

We also have data for each of the regions in England. London fares as the region where deaf children are least likely to do as well as all children. Here, a deaf children is 50% less likely to hit the Government’s expected benchmark for success than all children.

This is the first time much of the data has been made available. Some is already hidden away on DCSF’s website in a different format – but DCSF have not published regional data, information on the attainment gaps and details of three year averages. They’ve passed this information to us because we asked for it, and have been happy for us to go ahead and publish it for them.

DCSF’s website also contains information about how other groups of children get on. I haven’t checked for this year but in the past, the gap in achievement between deaf children and all children was greater than that between a) boys and girls and b) white boys and black Caribbean boys. The achievements of all children is obviously important – but it is striking how much attention has been placed on the latter two attainment gaps.

What do you think about the gaps in attainment? Are you surprised that it’s not narrowing? And what does the Government need to do to start closing the gap?

Data on how deaf children are doing at school

Apparently, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. And then there’s a new category: figures relating how deaf children get on at school.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families have given us the latest figures on the attainment of deaf children and we intend to publish them next Tuesday with some accompanying analysis and a pretty little spreadsheet. I don’t think it will come as a huge surprise when I say the figures will confirm that there is still a large attainment gap between deaf children and all children. We’ll be doing some media work to promote the figures and to call for more support for deaf children at schools.

At the same time, I’m bracing myself for a barrage of tut-tutting. The figures are quite controversial in some quarters because they don’t include all deaf children, only those who are getting specialist support at schools. Some have argued it’s misleading to use these figures and that it demoralises professionals.

I take a different view. The figures are not perfect but they are still the best available. No evidence has been provided to suggest the figures are unrepresentative or that there is not a wide attainment gap between deaf children and their hearing peers. If there was, I’d quite happily go home and watch Hollyoaks all day.

I see the point about demoralising staff. Which is why we’re always careful to say that we think professionals are dedicated and doing a good job with a lack of wider support and funding from their local authority and central Government. In any event, should professionals working with deaf children be exempt from wider discussion and scrutiny about how deaf children are doing?

Finally, the data is used for an important end – to shine the spotlight on the education of deaf children and to persuade Government to take action. If we held off from ever using data unless it was 100% verifiable and perfect, then we may never be able to make the case for action. And all the time, the education of deaf children would suffer. And that’s not acceptable.

It’s going to be interesting to see the reaction. In the meantime, what do you think? Are we right to publish the data and to use it to shine a spotlight on education of deaf children.

Better communication, better data and better outcomes for deaf children

Some festive good news came last week with the publication of a Government action plan on speech and language therapy, called Better Communication. The action plan followed the Bercow review, where the Conservative backbencher MP of the same name led a review on services for children with speech, language and communication needs. The action plan sets out a range of things the Government will do to improve such services.

And, to our surprise, the action plan committed the Department for Children, Schools and Families, to looking into collecting data on all children with special educational needs AND by type of disability from 2011. In terms of deaf children, we currently only have data on how deaf children who getting a high level of support are doing. If the Department goes ahead, this announcement means that for the first time we will have information on how ALL deaf children are doing.

This is a big step forward and is one of the recommendations from our campaign report, Must do better!, on the educational under achievement of deaf children. After all, we cannot improve the attainment of deaf children if it is not being measured in the first place. Better data also arms parents, local authorities and NDCS with the means to work out which schools and areas are doing best and, basically, what works.

On that positive note, I’m off for my Christmas break. Thanks to all for reading this and for their comments – do keep leaving your thoughts on these musings. Otherwise, have a great break and see you in 2009!

How many deaf children are there in England? The Government doesn’t know.

How many deaf children are in the UK? Based on prevalence rates, NDCS estimates 35,000 though we suspect this is an under estimate. So we decided to see what figures the Government holds on how many deaf children there are in England. We did this by asking a MP, the very helpful Sandra Gidley, to table a parliamentary question, as a means of getting the Government’s official answer.

Which was that the data is not collected centrally.

When you think about it, it’s quite surprising that the Government does not even have a rough idea. Are they not at least measuring how many deaf babies are being identified as deaf through the newborn hearing screening programme? And then tagging on the numbers for how many come to audiology clinics after becoming deaf as a child. But I spoke with NDCS’s audiology expert and she told me that until recently the Government didn’t even know how many audiology clinics there were in the UK. It would be laughable if it didn’t have such major implications for deaf children. For example, how can the Government make sure it can plan workforce development if it doesn’t know how many deaf children are coming through the system? How does it know how many teachers of the deaf need to be in place across the country when all the children born today grow up? How does it know what likely demand for hearing aids and cochlear implants will be? How can it make sure that deaf children get the services they need? Does it just play it by chance?

It’s no way to support deaf children. And I find it quite depressing.

PS The Scottish Government doesn’t know how many deaf children there are in Scotland either. NDCS Scotland has been doing some campaign work around this up there…

Celebrating new legislation on Special Educational Needs

I went to a reception at the Department for Children, Schools and Families last week for a special reception. I knew it was going to be my kind of party when I saw they were serving Pringles. As a child, I was reknowned all around Leicestershire for my ability to eat a whole tub of Pringles in one go.

Anyhow, the purpose of the reception was to celebrate the passing of the Special Educational Needs (Information) Act. This is the piece of legislation, which I’ve blogged about a few times before, that will require the Government to collect more information about children with special educational needs do at school and was spearheaded by Sharon Hodgson MP. For deaf children, it’s an important development. If we don’t measure how deaf children are doing, how can we improve it? As the legislation was making its way through Parliament, we worked hard to lobby MPs to support the Bill.

Attending were a range of charities who had supported and lobbied for the Bill, Sharon Hodgson herself, Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, and the new Minister for SEN – Sarah McCarthy Fry.

Sarah was still only around 3 days into the job so we were not expecting her to talk at length about the Act and what will happen in practice going forward – but she did say a few encouraging words about how there was no reason why disabled children should not be doing better. Which is exactly the point at the heart of our Close the Gap campaign. Sharon Hodgson also took the opportunity to thank NDCS and all other charities that had supported the Bill – which was very nice of her.

It was a good opportunity to meet everyone and find out what’s happening next on a range of things. I did unfortunately get slightly starstruck when meeting Ed Balls. And I was even more lost for words when Sharon Hodgson gave me a peck on the cheek as I was leaving. Clearly, I’m not as cool as I thought…

Going forward though, we’ll be keeping an eye out on the Act and making sure it is used to produce lots of useful data about deaf children. And, as for me, I’m going to be trying to wean myself off my addiction to Pringles all over again.