Schools: British Sign Language

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

I will of course give way, but I do not know why the Tories have precedence.

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

While welcoming the Minister’s answer, I wonder whether he would be willing to have a wider consultation, in which I personally could be involved. He may be aware that only 27,000 of Britain’s 11.5 million deaf people use sign language, and that the remainder need a whole lot more speech therapy, which includes both sorts of communication. The difficulty of sign language is that it does not create sentences, let alone paragraphs and pages, so children using it cannot enter the national curriculum. Investment in speech therapy is surely the way forward, because it enables children and young people to speak and communicate, visually and orally.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I appreciate the detail that my noble friend has given. I would like to add to it, because there are complexities here. For example, GCSEs in other languages require students to demonstrate the four skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening; in BSL there are only two skills: production and reception. We also need to address the question of whether the GCSE would be aimed at students for whom BSL is their first language or at those learning it from scratch. This will have a significant impact on the level of difficulty at which it is pitched.