Press Release
National Deaf Children’s Society launches offer to improve support for deaf children
The National Deaf Children’s Society has launched an Educational Membership offer to further improve the support provided by childcare settings, schools and colleges for deaf pupils across the UK.
The offer complements the charity’s existing raft of support for teachers of deaf children and young people and has been especially designed for mainstream and specialist early years providers, schools and further education settings throughout the UK.
The National Deaf Children’s Society devised the offer to build firmer and more enduring partnerships with educational settings by providing tailored and targeted support packages.
Members will receive a range of bespoke benefits from the charity, including a free inset training session each year, regular, tailored updates on education policies that affect deaf children, discounts on training and events for professionals.
Educational Membership starts at just £15 per academic year and is dependent on the size of the establishment. The fee has been calculated on a not-for-profit basis, purely to cover the cost of administering the scheme.
So far, over 50 educational establishments have signed up to the offer.
Holly Busby of the National Deaf Children’s Society, who is co-ordinating the Educational Membership offer, said:
“Helping families secure support for their children at school remains a key focus of the National Deaf Children’s Society’s work. But the sad fact is that over two thirds of teachers aren’t confident they can teach deaf children effectively and a third aren’t receiving crucial support from specialist staff.
“That’s why we devised this offer, to further improve the support we already give to the teachers who work with deaf children, enabling them to reduce barriers for deaf children and increase deaf awareness across their school communities.
“Deafness isn’t a learning disability – with the right support, there’s no reason why deaf schoolchildren shouldn’t achieve just as much as their hearing classmates.”
Kath O’Shea, of the Nene Infant School and Ramnoth Junior School, and new educational members, said:
“As a school we joined the membership as we want to further support our children with hearing loss and felt the resources and access to support and training would help us achieve this. I discussed the membership with the Teacher of the Deaf who works with our school, who felt the National Deaf Children’s Society provides good quality resources and information which she could support us with.”
