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.

Who will make deaf children matter in the general election?

All the newspapers seem to be busy publicly endorsing political parties, so I guess it’s only fair and proper that this blog, as an equally important media outlet, advises you on who you should vote for tomorrow.

This blog therefore endorses the following party for the general election 2010….

Only joking! I would probably get carted off to jail or, worse, forbidden from ever going near the chocolate digestives at work ever again. Charities need to be politically impartial under the law, after all. In any event, I’m quite old-fashioned about voting and think everyone should decide individually and privately who they want to vote for, without nudges and winks from others.

Image courtesy of NDCS

However, if you are interested in what the parties say about deaf children, disability and special educational needs, then the National Deaf Children’s Society website has a very short summary of what the three main UK party manifestos have to say on this, which may help guide you.

You can also read the transcripts from the interviews that education spokespersons from each party did with deaf young people back in January.

Finally, you can also see whether the politicians in your area have promised to support deaf children if they are elected, by signing the National Deaf Children’s Society election pledge for deaf children.

The election promises to be very close and the next Government is likely to be making some difficult decisions on public spending cuts to come, so every vote will make a difference.

Happy voting!

Will new pupil and parent guarantees make a difference for deaf children?

A busy week doing campaign work on audiology training, access to exams and British Sign Language in primary schools. In an attempt to try and juggle four things at the same time, I also wrote up a draft National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) consultation response on the Department for Children, Schools and Families’ proposed new pupil and parent guarantees for schools in England.

The guarantees are basically a write up of existing and new entitlements for children and parents in schools. So, for example, if a child is falling behind, the pupil is “guaranteed” catch up support. The guarantees detail how you can ‘claim’ your entitlements.

Usually when I write consultations responses, I end up saying something lilke: “Hello?! One in five children have a special educational need?! Duh!” in light of the often zero consideration of the needs of children, such as deaf children. But this consultation was refreshingly different – the needs of children with special educational needs or disabilities, and their entitlements, was referenced throughout. It is the first time I can recall seeing a government document about all children really “mainstream” the needs of children who need extra support. My draft consultation response is therefore generally supportive and positive, a new and unsettling experience for me.

As for the policy, people have mixed views on it. The “guarantees” alone won’t guarantee that every deaf child gets the support they need. But they could be a powerful means to an end? Where deaf children are falling behind, parents now have a new mechanism to make a fuss about it and demand they get more help. The proof will be in the pudding but it adds a new weapon to our armoury when battling to get better education for deaf children.

But what do you think? NDCS is inviting views on our draft response so let us know if you agree/disagree, or if there is any key point that we’ve missed. You can read the draft response via the NDCS website. Deadline for comments is the 19th March.

Ofsted failing to inspect education for deaf children?

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Tomorrow, a recurring issue around Ofsted inspections will be under the spotlight again in Parliament…

The issue? Why Ofsted inspections of schools that cater for deaf children, for example, those with a unit or resource base, so often seem to be inspected by people with zero expertise in deafness? Parents of deaf children already get very little information about education for deaf children, so I imagine many feel patronised that Ofsted inspectors don’t seem to think it’s important enough to comment on their children’s specific needs. Or they send someone who can’t even communicate with the deaf children at the school.

The National Deaf Children’s Society submitted evidence to the Lamb inquiry on the problem so it was great that the final report recommended that Ofsted change the way it looks at education for children with special educational needs (SEN). Some other good news came when Ofsted announced it would change its inspection framework, as of September last year, to make sure that inspectors of provision for children with SEN actually have expertise in that SEN.

So it was pretty disappointing to hear towards the end of last year from a father that his deaf son’s school, which has a unit, had just been inspected, and that the inspectors didn’t engage with the deaf children at all. Only after persistent chasing, was the father able to get Ofsted to confirm that none of the inspectors had any expertise in deafness.

Tomorrow, the House of Commons will be looking at a section of the Children, Schools and Families Bill which covers the Lamb inquiry recommendation on Ofsted. We’re supporting this section of the Bill and we hope that MPs will be able to confirm with the Government that Ofsted really is going to improve the way it handles these types of inspections.

Have you got any views or experiences of Ofsted inspections of education for deaf children? If so, please have your say and leave a comment below.

Final Lamb inquiry report on SEN now out

Brian Lamb finally published his report last week on how the Government can increase parental confidence in the special educational needs (SEN) system, and just before Christmas too. After three interim reports, the Lamb reports were beginning to feel a bit like a gift that keeps on giving.

The final report makes for very interesting reading. It contains not 1, not 2, but 51 recommendations on actions needed to improve the SEN system. NDCS has given a very warm welcome to the report which addresses a range of issues from our Must do better! report on educational underachievement of deaf children and our Close the Gap campaign.

Some of the recommendations had already been published and are being acted upon already by the Government. For example, recommendations on making Ofsted inspectors more inclusive and stronger rights of appeal for parents in the statementing process are being taken forward by the Children, Schools and Families Bill. This piece of legislation is due to get its first debate in Parliament in January, and NDCS will be calling for it to get through Parliament quickly, before the general election.

Other recommendations are new and a welcome surprise to boot. Currently, schools don’t have to take ‘reasonable adjustments’ if a deaf child needs auxiliary aids (like, for example, a microphone or amplification system). It’s often provided as a part of a statement, but this isn’t much consolation to the many deaf children who don’t have a statement. So the Lamb inquiry proposes that disability discrimination laws be improved so that schools do have to make reasonable adjustments in this area. NDCS is going to be writing to the Government to stress how important this is.

Another surprise was a recommendation for a new national and independent helpline on SEN. Given the volume of calls NDCS’s free helpline gets, there would seem to be a clear need for this.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families is going to be publishing it’s formal response to all of the recommendations in January, but already they’ve issued a fairly warm response. I’ll be checking to make sure the warm words lead to warm actions.

What do you think of the report and its proposals for improving the SEN system? Is it good news for deaf children? Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.

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?

Deaf awareness of mainstream teachers

Image courtesy of www.fbarnes.camden.sch.uk

When I was younger, a precocious deaf child in a mainstream school, I had some teachers who were great, worked hard to include me in the classroom and also had high expectations of what I could do, always challenging me to work harder. Then there were other teachers who, to put it bluntly, didn’t have a clue. I can remember times where teachers would talk while not facing me, make me listen to radio / TV programmes with no transcript or subtitles, forget to put my microphone on (or leaving it on when they want to the staff room) or telling me off for not doing something, when I hadn’t heard the instruction in the first place. I was a saintly child and obviously never misbehaved. Ahem.

A NDCS survey from last year for the Must do better! campaign found that one in four parents of deaf children didn’t rate the deaf awareness of their child’s teachers which makes me think that not much has changed since I was last at school. With this in mind, we recently sent a paper to the Lamb inquiry into parental confidence in the special educational needs system on this issue – the second paper we’ve sent so far.

The paper specifically calls for more tailored training and support to teachers when a deaf child enters their classroom. This is a slight shift from focusing on initial teacher training. This is obviously important, but in the same way that nobody remembers how to speak French from their French GCSE, it’s unlikely that teachers are going to remember the details of how to include deaf children in the classroom especially when it’s bunched together with training on how to include other children with special educational needs. Given that deafness is a low incidence disability, it may be a few years before the average mainstream teacher encounters a deaf child in the classroom. So a better approach might be to, when a child with special educational needs is themself assessed as needing further support, also assess the teacher for what further training and guidance they need to be able to include the deaf child in their classroom. Kind of like a “teacher’s entitlement” which could be applied to all children with special educational needs.

What do you think of the proposal? What more can be done to improve mainstream teacher training of deaf children?

How to improve parental confidence in the education system?

That’s the question the Lamb Inquiry is currently looking at since last year after being asked by the Government to hold an inquiry on the special educational needs (SEN) system and why so many parents feel like they have to wage war to get support for their child.

We’ve been feeding in some informal thoughts but now NDCS is going to be producing a formal response which I’m currently working on. I spent much of today in a meeting with one of my colleagues to find out more about what parents of deaf children have fed back to us over the years. And one big issue that comes up time and time again is the process of how a child comes to get a statement, which sets out their entitlements to support at school, and how the SEN Code of Practice is followed in practice.

Some of the key points that seem to be emerging include:

* Lots of statements tend to be vague about a deaf child’s needs and what impact deafness has on their daily life. This makes it difficult to then specify what support is needed on a practical basis.

* Local authorities are often very reluctant to specify exactly what support the child needs / will get. For example, it might say that the child should have access to a communication support worker. But it won’t say how often or what skills the communication support worker should have. Some local authorities apparently have a policy of never being too specific on statements to avoid having to make commitments they made not be able to afford.

* Annual reviews of the statement sometimes seem to be just a talking shop. Parents are sometimes not provided with the necessary papers beforehand. Others find the meetings intimidating. Children’s views are not always sought. And perhaps worse, if a child’s objectives are not met, a few parents report that last year’s objectives are just copied and pasted into next year’s objectives, rather than using the annual review as an opportunity to problem solve why the objectives have not been met and work out what other support is needed.

One Family Officer said that in all her years of supporting parents on statements, she had “not come across one OK, let alone good, statement”.

What do you think? If you’re a parent of a deaf child, what have you been your experiences of the statementing system? What needs to be done to improve things? I’ll factor in any thoughts into the formal response.

Musical chairs as Government reshuffles

For political geeks like me, the last two weeks have been fascinating. How many Ministers would abandon ship? Would we have a new Prime Minister? Would the Government just implode and leave a massive cleaning bill behind?

Well, now the dust has settled, we can see who is left standing. And once again, the musical chairs reshuffle of Government Ministers means we have a few new faces in NDCS’s key departments of interest.

Perhaps the key one is at the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). Sarah McCarthy-Fry, who was the lead Minister responsible for special educational needs, has gone. Replacing her is Diana Johnson. Who, to be honest, I don’t know very much about though I need to find out quickly.

I can see the rationale for fresh blood. But it has been less than a year since the last injection of fresh blood. And now we have a period of uncertainty as we wait for the new Minister to get up to speed. And we have also have to start again with briefing the new Minister with details of NDCS, what we’re about and what we’d like from the Government. Just like we did less than a year ago. It’s like a Governmental Groundhog Day.

Perhaps the biggest pain of all is that a meeting between ministers at DCSF and the Department for Communities and Local Government that was due to take place next week and at which we were hoping to make a breakthrough on our acoustics campaign has now been postponed. The biggest irony of all? The two ministers in question have swapped over to each other’s departments.

Obviously, Government shouldn’t be run according to what’s convenient to campaigners like me. But I can’t help thinking, does this annual rejuvenation make for good Government? I’m not so sure.

Primary curriculum review fails deaf children?

Sir Jim Rose’s review of the primary curriculum was published yesterday. It promises fairly fundamental changes to the way young children learn at schools. And with one in five children having a special educational need, surely the report will have lots to say about how such children can learn effectively in the classroom?

Nope. Nada. Zilch.

It was painfully depressing and tiresome and predictable. There was nothing in the main report’s recommendations about meeting the needs of children with special educational needs. There was a brief mention later where it said that the teaching of phonics might not work for a “minority” of children and that teachers should seek specialist advice. Note that the onus is on teachers to do this, not on the Government to provide advice and support. And frustratingly, it refers to feedback from parents of “mixed experiences” in schools meeting their child’s needs, but then does nothing to really address this.

NDCS did a press story on this and we’re likely to be banging on about this until we get a government commitment that the curriculum must be accessible to all children, and that guidance must be made available on how to do this for deaf children. Frankly, I think it’s ridiculous that teachers are expected to tailor their teaching on literacy, emotional well-being and languages with nothing in the way of guidance and support.