Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

My Lords, the Prime Minister has declared that 75% of five year-olds should have reached a good level of development. This is one of his key goals—I support that fully. I will refer exclusively to deaf children in these few minutes. Nearly 1 million people are born in the UK profoundly deaf. This gives us approximately 50,000 deaf children, as of today. Those children are nearly all put into normal classes, where they have no specialist teaching to help them speak, nor to understand what others are saying; yet speaking and comprehending what others are saying are the essential keys to these children reaching the good level of development to which the Prime Minister refers.

There are only 860 qualified teachers of speech therapy in Britain, so the lack of speech therapy is one of the key problems. Deaf children need to learn to speak in the same way as their family and classmates; and, equally, they need to be able to understand what others are saying. Yet there are 1.9 million children in the queue for speech therapy in the UK today. The likelihood of deaf children getting to the front of that queue is rather small. Deafness, of course, excludes children, not just from speaking and from understanding speech, but from other subjects as well. Even sports, for example, give deaf children problems with balance, since physical deafness means balance is also harmed.

There is another way and I ask the Minister to consider singing teaching. The strength of singing lies in its capacity to create correct articulation; language; the meaning of words and sentences; plus strengthening physical health through breathing and posture. Even better, social participation of all kinds comes when children are in a choir or taught singing individually. Singing and interacting with others through music is an important window out of the loneliness that is a direct result of the disability of deafness in children.

I ask the Minister to make these 50,000 children a top disability educational priority. This could be an easy win that flows right into this Government’s commitment to education for all children, provided that every possible tool is brought into place, including, but not only, music. Might the Minister meet me to discuss the ways in which music brings all children, even those of every disability, right into the harmonious fold with others? I would be grateful.