Support for Deaf Children: South Gloucestershire

Luke Hall Excerpts

Wednesday 9th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Luke Hall (Thornbury and Yate) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered support for deaf children in south Gloucestershire.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I am delighted to have secured a vital debate about the issues faced by deaf children and their families in South Gloucestershire. I am grateful to the House authorities for ensuring that there is a signer today in the Public Gallery and live subtitles during the debate.

I secured the debate after meeting parents and families of deaf children in my constituency, and subsequently the National Deaf Children’s Society, to discuss the current review of service provision across the four authority areas in the west of England. I thank those families and the NDCS for discussing the matter with me in great depth, and for all the work they do up and down the country to make life better and fairer for deaf and hearing-impaired children.

Hearing loss affects more than 10 million adults and around 45,000 children in the UK. Of those, around half are born deaf, while others can acquire the condition later during childhood. Around 370 children are born with severe to profound deafness in England each year. Deafness in children can be temporary or permanent, and it can be mild or profound. It can be in one ear or in both. Regardless of its type, it is often a very high-need condition and it can have a serious impact on children’s development and their ability to achieve their ambitions. It can affect language development, ability to communicate and educational achievements and attainment, and it can increase the risk of isolation and mental health difficulties. Around 48% of deaf children fail to reach the expected levels of language communication skills in their early years. It is easy to see how this condition can go on to have a negative impact on children and affect their quality of life.

Local authorities and schools in England already are required to provide support for deaf children, to ensure that young children especially are not at a substantial disadvantage to their hearing peers. The fact that only one in five children passes GCSE English and maths in the south-west demonstrates that there is still much more to do. Deaf children in South Gloucestershire face the same issues. Despite the fact that deafness is not a learning disability, 44% of deaf children are likely not to do as well as their peers. It is clear that more needs to be done to close the gap, to support children and to ensure that they have a fair chance of maximising their educational achievements and fulfilling their potential.

Deaf children and young people in South Gloucestershire rely on support provided to them by the Sensory Support Service, which has served other neighbouring local authorities since 1996: Bath and North East Somerset, Bristol and North Somerset. The service supports the educational development of children in the area who have sensory impairment and who are aged between zero and 16.

In November 2017, the four authorities decided to carry out a review of all the support services. That review is at an early stage. A stakeholder reference group has been created to enable parents, charities, children and carers to input into the review, and it allows anyone affected to have their say. The stakeholder group is meeting for the first time later this month, and it is timely to have this debate just days before that meeting is due to take place. The redesigned service will come into effect around September 2019, and it will continue to be jointly commissioned by the four authorities. Now is the right time to ensure that the new revised service is fit for purpose and is serving deaf children well in our community.

There are four main points that I would like to raise, which should be considered as part of the review: early years support, teachers of the deaf, speech and language therapy and, importantly, the provision of radio aids.

[Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate and pay tribute to the fantastic work he is doing on this important matter for children in our council area. I welcome more proposals, in particular to ensure that the new Sensory Support Service prioritises the provision of radio aids for children to use in nursery and at home. That would be hugely beneficial to the children and their families, who need that highly valuable resource.

[Luke Hall]

I welcome my hon. Friend’s comments. I will talk about the issues he raised in a bit more detail, but he has hit the nail on the head about the need for hearing aids and other assisted listening technologies outside the school or nursery setting. I thank him for that, and for his important work in South Gloucestershire on behalf of the communities.

Early years support services can be vital in determining a child’s future success. Therefore, it is important that local children get the targeted support that they require as early as possible during their development. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Many deaf children can face a lack of pre-school and early years support. The foundations for communication and language skills are often laid during the earliest stage of a child’s life. Local parents have expressed their concerns about the uncertainty that comes with the review and about making sure that the outcome is right. Support for early years and pre-school must be prioritised and strengthened during the review period.

Support in the form of teachers of the deaf can be extremely useful for children with hearing loss. They provide specialist training and advice to teachers, parents and pupils on how to deal with the difficulties that come with the everyday challenges that people may face. Those teachers can give skilled assistance to pupils and their families and make a significant contribution to their academic progress and achievement later in life. Currently, there are unfilled vacancies in South Gloucestershire that are a source of concern to local parents, who want to ensure that the frontline delivery of services remains a priority after September 2019. Parents want to be certain that children in our community will continue to have fair access to help from those specialist teachers so that they can continue to make positive improvements in their development and learning. It is vital that the review protects frontline teaching of the deaf.

My third point is about therapy support—specifically, speech and language therapy provision—beyond key stage 1 in South Gloucestershire. Speech and language therapy—SALT—can help children to develop better communication skills, optimise their speech, build their confidence and improve their interaction with others. It is important to ensure that the appropriate specialised SALT support is provided beyond key stage 1, because it can make a real difference to the development of children’s communication.

It is important that local children can continue to benefit from the expert advice and assessment of the NHS SALT service after the review. This is, therefore, the perfect time for South Gloucestershire Council and other authorities to consider improving the joining up of provision and support between health and education organisations, especially following the Ofsted report. Although I accept that in some cases commissioning is delegated to schools, it is important to ensure that support such as the provision of teachers of the deaf and SALT is complemented, and that there are no gaps in the provision of services for deaf children. That is a real concern that parents and the NDCS in particular have raised with me.

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate. He raises important points about education provision in South Gloucestershire, which is not as good as it should be. South Gloucestershire does not do as well as neighbouring local authorities such as Bristol, particularly for deaf children and people with special educational needs. On speech and language therapy provision and its funding, does he believe that the Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire clinical commissioning group also has a role to play? Deafness is a special educational need and a physical impairment, and its detection can take place at GP centres and in hospitals, so the NHS and South Gloucestershire Council both have roles to play.

[Luke Hall]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and for all the work he does on behalf of people, including children, around South Gloucestershire. He is absolutely right: of course the clinical commissioning group and local NHS services have a role in ensuring that children around South Gloucestershire receive optimal support. He is right to point out that there are clearly ways we can improve in South Gloucestershire following the Ofsted report.

The need for improved access to assistive listening technologies such as radio aids—especially, as my hon. Friend the Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti) pointed out, for pre-school children outside the nursery setting—has come up time and again in my conversations with local parents. Radio aids help deaf children to hear speech and sounds more clearly, as they transmit sound directly to a child’s hearing aid or implant. That can be critical in the early years of a child’s life, when they are at the earliest stage of learning. Radio aids can play an essential role in language development and in improving parent-to-child communication in the home and outside nursery.

We had a fascinating day when the NDCS brought hearing aids here so that we could hear the remarkable difference, in a busy and loud environment, between having that technology and not having it. Such environments often make for difficult listening conditions, and radio aids can prove useful in reducing the effects of background noise and improving the listening experience. Using them in places such as the car, public transport, after-school clubs and the home can make a big difference in a child’s language development and improve their concentration and attention.

[Chris Skidmore]

My hon. Friend is being very generous in giving way. Is that not the critical point? Academics such as Leon Feinstein have shown that word acquisition varies: at the age of three, a child in a disadvantaged family might know 600 words but a child in a more affluent family might know nearly 6,000 words. For a deaf child, being able to acquire words early is vital. The success of the Government’s phonics programme in developing language acquisition has clearly been proven, but that cannot take place unless we have radio aids. Does he therefore believe that there should be universal provision of radio aids for deaf children in South Gloucestershire, and that children should be able to take those aids outside the school setting to ensure they are constantly learning and engaged in whatever setting they are in?

[Luke Hall]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point out the success of the Government’s phonics programme and the disparity in children’s vocabulary. I will come on to an example of a child in my constituency who benefited and learned new words by being part of a trial in South Gloucestershire that made radio aids possible. I completely agree that it is vital for people to have access to radio aids outside the home.

Living with hearing loss is sometimes an isolating and lonely experience, and radio aids have been shown to have positive effects on children’s psychological and emotional wellbeing and self-confidence. Perhaps the best argument for the use of radio aids I have heard came from my constituent, Hannah, whose daughter has severe hearing loss and has been wearing hearing aids since she was eight weeks old. Hannah’s daughter was offered the chance to use a radio aid for a trial period. Hannah told me how beneficial that had been for her daughter, who started to pick up new vocabulary and became more confident and independent. That radio aid enabled her to have an experience of life that was much more like that of her hearing friends.

Local parents are concerned about the fact that although the provision of radio aids outside the school or nursery setting might be greatly beneficial, it is not a certainty for children in South Gloucestershire. In this review period, there is even more uncertainty about what will come post September next year. I therefore urge all four authorities to use the review to consider providing radio aids to all deaf and hearing-impaired children for use in the home and outside the school or nursery setting as quickly as possible.

I ask the Minister to urge South Gloucestershire Council and the other three authorities to take the review process as an opportunity to evaluate overall provision for local deaf children, and to have in mind the four points I have raised: prioritising early years and pre-school provision and ensuring that it is strengthened as a result of the review; protecting the provision of teaching of the deaf; joining up the teaching of the deaf and speech and language therapy services, which is particularly important and has been raised a number of times; and considering providing radio aids to all deaf and hearing-impaired children outside the home as quickly as possible. The review gives us the opportunity to improve the support we offer to deaf children, and to help children in South Gloucestershire to develop better communication skills, optimise their speech skills, build their confidence in interactions with their families and others, maximise their academic attainment and become more confident and independent. Taking those steps will make that possible.