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

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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?

New rights for parents of deaf children

The Lamb inquiry into parental confidence in the special educational needs system pumped out two more interim reports on Monday. The first one was on the quality of statements of support for children with special educational needs. And it contained a recommendation that left some of my colleagues flabbergasted – a new right for parents to appeal if the statement for their child is not updated or modified to reflect changing need.

Lots of parents have told NDCS that statements seem to be set in stone once they are drafted. So a child moving to secondary school might still have the same statement they had when they had as a very young child. There are apparently examples of statements for older children saying that a child is not yet toilet trained. Children don’t stay the same forever, so why should statements? NDCS stressed this point in our formal submission to the Lamb inquiry.

Currently, statements should be annually reviewed and a parent can ask for an interim review. But the local authority doesn’t have to change the content of the statement unless the parent demands a re-assessment, a long and painful process for many parents to contemplate.

So the recommendation, which has already been accepted by the Government, is big news, which is likely to make a big difference. Another recommendation that guidance should be produced for local authorities on how to draft statements will also helpfully shake things up. Part of me still wonders whether more needs to be done to monitor and check the quality of statements but maybe that will come in the final Lamb inquiry report, due out in the autumn.

And I haven’t even started on the second interim report which had also offers the promise of more big changes for deaf children and Ofsted. Come back soon for more info on this…

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.

NDCS meetings with Ministers and MPs

I will need to get my suit out this week… We try to meet with MPs regularly to keep them informed of our campaigns but this week, the NDCS campaigns team has an unusually busy week of meetings with 3 Ministers and 1 senior MP. We may as well camp out at Westminster.

Firstly, we due to meet with Phil Hope and Ann Keen from the Department for Health to talk about our campaign on newborn hearing screening. We’re hoping the Department will set out how it will make sure that the areas which are failing to screen all babies for deafness will be brought up to speed.

Secondly, we’re meeting with Iain Wright at the Department for Communities and Local Government where we will be pressing for a new requirement for pre-completion acoustic testing as part of our Sounds good? campaign.

And thirdly, we’re meeting with senior Conservative MP John Bercow to also talk about our Sounds good? campaign on acoustics as well as some of our wider concern about support for children with special educational needs.

The meetings are a great opportunity to impress on senior decision makers our concerns and why urgent action to help deaf children is needed. A lot of work obviously goes into preparing for these kinds of meetings and one of my responsibilities as a campaigns officer is to make sure we make the most out of these opportunities. Pre-meetings are held here to discuss what points we want to raise and briefing documents are written so that all the relevant background information is available to hand.

My fear is that one or more of these meetings will get postponed at the last minute which is depressingly common given the hectic lives that Ministers and MPs lead… But here’s hoping the meetings all go ahead and we make some progress this week in our campaign work for deaf children. At least enough to justify the dry cleaning bill for my suit…

MPs debate deaf children and the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

MPs have now gone through the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning (ASCL) Bill, line by line, and considered all of the amendments. Such was their determination to do it, they ended up staying up in Parliament until well past midnight. This left me with an image of MPs sitting in a room with their pyjamas, clutching hot water bottles and teddy bears, but anyhow…

NDCS concerns got raised a few times which we were pleased with. Anything that raises the needs of deaf children within Parliament is always good news. Here’s a very brief run down of what was said:

1) Teacher training. We want the Government to give teachers an explicit entitlement to training if a child with special educational needs enters the classroom. Currently, it’s proposed that all employers will have the right to request training. We think teachers need to be proactively encouraged and enabled to take up training to work with children with special educational needs – and given a clear entitlement to this.

The Government made some positive noises about ongoing efforts to improve teacher training so that teachers know how to work with children with SEN. But no new rights. So we’ll continue to lobby on this.

2) Ofsted. We wanted an amendment that would make sure that a school couldn’t be given a ranking of good or outstanding unless provision for children with special educational needs is also good or outstanding. The Minister said it would be “highly unlikely” if this happened. This in itself was helpful and gives us something to hold the Government to account to. But then again, we were left wondering that if it will be highly unlikely, why not make it completely impossible? So again, we’ll be continuing to lobby the Government on this.

3) Acoustics. We again made our call for pre-completion acoustic testing to be required in all schools. Here, we were disappointed by the Government’s response which pretty much said that a review was ongoing. It didn’t really respond to any of the concerns raised and didn’t take us any further forward. You can guess what we’ll be doing next.

There was also a bit of debate over apprenticeships and disabled people which I’ll come back to another time as we’ve had some interesting correspondence with Government officials on this.

So when will we get to do some more lobbying? The Bill will soon have its third reading in the House of Commons where MPs basically tie up loose ends. Then it will be the turn of the House of Lords to look at the Bill. The plan is to engage with and brief peers on our concerns on the Bill in the aim of making improvements to benefit deaf children.

NDCS supports call for action on inclusion

As well as being an opportunity to eat lots of easter eggs, Easter is traditionally the time of the year when teachers get together for their various conferences. The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Woman Teachers or NASUWT have been busy this week debating the difficulties teachers face in making inclusion of children with special educational needs a reality in the classroom.

This chimes with much of our campaign work to Close the Gap in how deaf children do at school compared to their hearing friends. So we issued a press statement in support. And here is what we said:

“The National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) is supporting the NASUWT’s call for action on inclusion. NDCS believes all deaf children have a right to an education that makes them feel fully included in the life of the school and ensures that they make the same educational progress as their hearing peers. To achieve this, a continuum of provision is needed to ensure that the education service meets the needs of all deaf children. Too often, this is not available and children are expected to adapt without the support they need. As a result deaf children continue to under achieve – deaf children were 41% less likely to achieve 5 GCSEs at grades A* to C, including. English and Maths, in 2007.

A significant number of parents regularly contact the National Deaf Children’s Society with concerns that their child is not receiving his or her entitlement to appropriate education. When we investigate, we often find frontline classroom teachers trying their best in very difficult circumstances without the required support and advice to meet the pupil’s needs.

Teacher’s need more support. When a child with special educational needs enters the classroom, teachers should automatically be given training, access to qualified specialist support and guidance on how to adapt the curriculum for their needs.

We support NASUWT’s call that inclusion needs to be addressed. Government and local authorities need to take action to ensure that inclusion is a reality for all deaf children.”

There you have it. I’m now going to go back to wondering how to pronounce NASUWT…

DCSF consultation convulsions vol. 3: the primary curriculum

Another day, another consultation… The latest is the independent review into the primary curriculum Sir Jim Rose. An interim report was published late last year and the deadline for comments passed over the weekend.

So what did Sir Jim Rose have to say about children with special educational needs and the primary curriculum? Given that one in five children are reported to have some form of special educational need, it’s obviously going to be high on the agenda when considering how the primary curriculum should be reformed and made relevant to everyone. Yes?

Well, here’s the thing. There was virtually no mention. No mention of deaf children, and no mention of any other group who might have additional needs.

OK, so it’s only an interim report. But if you’re going to looking at major reforms of the primary curriculum, surely you’re going to want to consider how everyone is going to access this new curriculum, and make recommendations for how this will be met FROM THE OUTSET. Not afterwards. And definitely not after the whole thing has been implemented on the ground.

The Government has done this before – by introducing phonics as a new method of teaching literacy without considering how this would work for deaf children.

Our response has been to say you can’t get away with treating deaf children as an afterthought. No new curriculum initiatives should be introduced unless without first considering – at the very beginning – how the needs of all children can be met.

Here’s hoping someone in the review team heeds this point.