Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many deaf children attended mainstream schools in England in each of the last 10 years; and how many such children were taught British Sign Language in each of those years.

The number of children with special educational needs (SEN) who have ‘hearing impairment’ listed as their primary need can be found in the annual statistical first release ‘Special Educational Needs in England’ on GOV.UK. Table 1, below, provides collated figures for the last ten years, for pupils attending state-funded primary and secondary schools. These figures include children in resourced provision or SEN units but not children in special schools. There will be children whose primary need is not ‘hearing impairment’ but who, nevertheless, have a hearing impairment. These children are not covered by this information.

From September 2014 the ’SEN support’ category replaced the ’school action’ and ‘school action plus’ categories. Those recoded, in 2015, as having ‘SEN support’ but who were formerly included in the ‘school action’ category will not previously have had a primary type of need recorded. This is likely to have contributed to the large increase – between 2014 and 2015 – in the numbers of children recorded as having a hearing impairment.

The Department does not collect statistics on the number of deaf children in mainstream schools who are being taught British Sign Language.

Table 1:

The links to published data can be found here: