Deaf Children and Young People

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I will be very brief so that the other Members trying to speak and the Minister replying to the debate can contribute.

First, I want to put on record my—and, I am sure, everybody else’s—thanks to the Backbench Business Committee for choosing the subject of today’s debate. This emphasises the importance of having a BBC that can enable a motion such as this to take place and I hope the House will approve of it. Under the old system it might have taken months and months of lobbying to get any debate in Government time on this kind of issue, apart from the lottery of trying to get an Adjournment debate.

I thank the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce) for what he said, and I am sorry I missed the first few minutes of his contribution. I also want to put on record my thanks to the campaign group Disability Action in Islington for the work it does for deaf people and people with disabilities across the borough. It often campaigns on getting signers for sign language, and it can be very expensive to get someone in to do signed translation. That is an area that needs to be looked at. I do not have an easy answer, but it is a complication.

Other Members have mentioned the excellent campaign briefing from NDCS, which works for children with profound deafness and hearing issues. My constituent Jon Barnes works for that campaign and he has been extremely helpful in highlighting these issues.

The hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) raised the problem of identifying children with hearing issues, and other Members talked about deaf children not being picked up in school by the teachers, with their parents either being unaware of the issue or not wanting to draw attention to it. Such children can gradually fall ever further behind their cohort group in school and eventually become educational under-achievers, and all sorts of other things follow from that. Ofsted inspections could look carefully at what is done in all schools to identify children with hearing difficulties. I know it sounds odd that we are even saying that, but it is actually perfectly possible for a child in a class of 30 children to be forgotten or ignored because they might be able to copy what others do where written answers are involved and have some minor level of hearing that enables them just about to cope. We need to ensure that all children are properly tested on their hearing abilities from the very beginning, and the Ofsted inspection could help to do that.

The figure that 75% of deaf children are not statemented is an interesting one, and the figure that 40% of those who suffer from profound deafness as children end up with mental health problems highlights how important it is to have the identification at a very early stage.

I know local authorities are up against it at the present time. I have just come from a meeting with the new leader of my local authority, Richard Watts, and he was explaining the horrendous problems it is facing in funding our current services. Islington is doing its very best to ensure that all children get a very good education, but in these circumstances it is very easy to see how in some local authorities the needs of a relatively small group of children will be forgotten or ignored, or the money will simply be spent on something else for which somebody is able to shout louder and push harder for the funding. Therefore, inspection and the protection and ring-fencing of the funds available for children with profound deafness are very important indeed.

The last point I wish to make is that if we ignore and do not provide sufficient support for children who suffer from this condition, their health will suffer and they will become increasingly dependent and less able to contribute to wider society. As a result, we all suffer, because we will spend money on children who ought to be able to achieve a great deal in school and on adults who ought to be able to achieve a great deal in life, but they end up unemployed and dependent when they could be making an enormous positive contribution to society. It is very wasteful not to identify the needs in the first place and to use all the available technology to improve communication and help people. Sign language and its teaching are very important vehicles for that.

We need to ensure that there is an acceptance that deafness is something that people can cope with if they have adequate support. If they are just ignored and forgotten as children, they end up having a much less fulfilling and less useful life than they could otherwise have. So I just hope that this motion is agreed, that the Government accept that it is important and that, in return, local authorities fulfil their basic obligation to ensure that every child gets the best possible education and the best possible treatment to deal with whatever condition they happen to be suffering from at the time they enter school.