Deaf People: Public Services

Baroness Jolly Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jolly (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an excellent debate. It has been wide-ranging and based on experience and expertise, with many recurring themes. I promise that I will be positive where I can be.

The Government recognise the scale of the issue. One in every 700 babies in England is born with some form of deafness and there are just under 10 million adults living with hearing loss. All these people will, at some point, be in contact with public services. In fact, we know that there are 35,000 children and 1.6 million adults with hearing loss being managed and supported across health and other public sector services. It is therefore absolutely vital that these public services are geared up to support their needs.

The public sector equality duty means that public bodies must have regard to the need to eliminate discrimination and to advance equality of opportunity when making policies and delivering services. Public bodies must make reasonable adjustments for disabled people to ensure that they can use a service that is as close as reasonably possible to the standard usually offered to everyone. I would like to take your Lordships through some detail on how different areas of the public sector are addressing this very important issue.

First, on health and social care, we know that there is a need to improve in the commissioning and integration of health and social care services for people with hearing loss, as well as in the provision of new and innovative models of care. This is why we are looking to develop a new action plan on hearing loss. The action plan will identify the key actions that will make a difference in improving health and social care outcomes for children, young people and adults with hearing loss. The Department of Health is currently engaging with a range of organisations, and aims to publish the action plan as soon as possible.

The new health and social care structures provide the framework to improve access to services and outcomes at a local level. The national adult social care, public health and NHS outcomes frameworks enable us to hold services to account for how they are tackling health inequalities and improving health and well-being. NHS England is developing an information standard around the provision of accessible information and communication support to disabled patients, carers and service users. It is intended to be finalised in late 2014, with organisations being required to comply in 2015. Once implemented, the standard will ensure that disabled patients, service users and carers receive information from NHS bodies and providers of NHS care in formats that they can understand, and that they receive appropriate support to enable them to communicate. All this should help people when they visit their GP. Certainly, at my GP practice, a name comes up: for example, “Jolly to go to room 4”. This is not rocket science. Plenty of practices do it.

The health service has already delivered considerable improvements in services, including reduced waits for the assessment and treatment of hearing problems in adults. Most patients on direct access audiology pathways are now treated within 18 weeks. There is greater choice of hearing aid services through independent high street providers and the new “any qualified provider” model, which offers even greater choice and convenience. We have rolled out a system of voluntary accreditation of hearing service providers to drive up service quality and introduced a payment-by-results tariff for hearing services, which should lead to service innovation.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, asked about plans to provide NHS staff with awareness training. What I have just outlined certainly covers that; NHS England will publish guidance on making reasonable adjustments to meet the communication needs of service users. That is expected next year. All NHS staff should have disability awareness training, and within that must come British Sign Language. The noble Lord also asked about annual screenings for over-65s on hearing loss. There are no plans at the moment to introduce such screening, but everyone in that age group should be invited for an annual health check that offers the opportunity to address such problems as hearing and vision, as well as other key health issues.

It is of course not just about assessing and treating deafness. My noble friend Lady Brinton asked what the Government are doing to develop a vaccine against cytomegalovirus. While there are currently no licensed vaccines, possible vaccinations are still being researched. She will appreciate the stringent safety checks that all new medicines and vaccines have to go through, so it will be several years before any vaccine becomes available.

In services for children and young people, we are taking forward measures to support children with sensory impairments, including giving parents in England the opportunity to have their babies’ hearing tested shortly after birth as part of the NHS newborn hearing screening programme. There will also be a more joined-up approach to assessments, which gives clarity on responsibility across the areas of education, health and social care services and a commitment from all of them to provide their services.

To answer the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, new school inspection arrangements mean that inspections of schools with resourced provision or specialist units for pupils with sensory impairments are assessed by inspectors with the necessary specialist advice. We are committed to improving the training of teachers and school leaders to help them identify where pupils with hearing loss face barriers to learning and offer the appropriate support. The Department for Education is funding the development of an early support guide for parents of deaf children and giving money to support I-Sign, hosted by the National Deaf Children's Society. This should develop access to sign language for families and education professionals.

My noble friend Lady Brinton made the point about I-Sign not being consistently employed and asked whether we should place a duty on local authorities to provide this support, as they do in some Scandinavian countries. The Children and Families Bill already places duties on local authorities to identify, assess and secure special educational provision for all children and young people with special educational needs. This could include sign language support for those who need it.

My noble friend made a number of additional points on the issue of specialist education support services for deaf children being hit by cuts. We can confirm that we have protected the resources available for SEN provision, including support for deaf children. The Children and Families Bill will include a new duty on local authorities to require them, with their partners, to publish a local offer of services available to families of children with SEN and disabilities.

On the issue of whether we need a national recruitment campaign for qualified deaf teachers, or for teachers to qualify for teaching the deaf, the National Scholarship Fund is available through the Department for Education and provides funding of up to £3,500 for teachers’ postgraduate qualifications and their training, including specialist training for teachers of the deaf. Funding of £2,000 is available to support teaching assistants and support staff to improve their skills. Indeed, 600 teachers have achieved or are working towards a qualification related to special educational needs and a further 500 have applied for the current funding round.

To answer the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, about the attainment gap, we have ensured that funding is protected. In 2011-12, 71% of deaf children achieved five or more A to C grades in their GCSE, compared with 43% in 2007-08. Over this period, deaf pupils progressed at approximately twice the rate of their peers, closing the attainment gap significantly. This is not to say that we are complacent, but there has been progress. The Government recognise the importance of deaf people being supported and enabled to communicate through BSL where they wish to do so. Schools can offer BSL programmes to pupils with a range of vocationally related BSL and other signing media qualifications, from a simple awareness certificate up to more advanced levels, and there is work to develop a GCSE programme in BSL.

However, it is not just in the areas of health, social care and education where good work is going on. Work is going on across the Government to support the needs of deaf people. We have heard from my noble friend Lady Eaton about the sort of work that has been going on in Bradford.

We have had a few examples of where great progress is being made. Good work is being done to make services more accessible for people with hearing loss across the criminal justice system, welfare, higher education and many other parts of the public sector. I pay tribute to the work of the voluntary sector. We have heard today about organisations such as Action on Hearing Loss, Signature and the National Deaf Children’s Society, which campaign tirelessly to ensure that the needs of deaf people are not forgotten and, in many instances, work alongside the Government to help us develop our policies and ensure that those policies are put into practice.

I hope that in the time allowed I have provided reassurance of the Government’s continued commitment. I will write to noble Lords to answer those questions that have not been covered, and I am more than happy to meet noble Lords to discuss these issues and to see whether we can progress them further.

House adjourned at 5.50 pm.