Deaf Awareness Week

This year, Deaf Awareness Week will be held from 28 June to 4 July. Our website is full of free resources for you to read, display in your workplace and email to friends.

Deaf awareness at work

Can you communicate clearly with colleagues and customers who are deaf or hard of hearing? Would you like to make your organisation more deaf aware? We offer deaf awareness training that can be tailored to your needs. Many organisations, from supermarkets to fire brigades, have a lready benefited from our popular courses.

Does your workplace have a working induction loop fitted in customer service areas? We often receive complaints about poorly maintained induction loops in public places. Check out our best practice guide (opens new browser window) to make sure that your workplace is accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Promoting deaf awareness

Can you help promote deaf awareness at your workplace, college or amongst friends? One simple thing you can do right now is get your colleagues thinking about their own hearing and why it matters. More than 560,000 people have already taken our free hearing check. It only takes five minutes. Do it online now, and encourage everyone you know to try it too

Deaf Awareness Week is an annual event supported by over one hundred deaf charities and organisations.
It takes place from 28 June to 4 July 2010.

What is it about?
Fundraising activities
School visits
Deaf friendly schools
How to publicise your Deaf Awareness Week activities
How your money will help

The aim of Deaf Awareness Week is to highlight the range of communication methods used by deaf children and their families.

Action for Deafness are having a fundraising day on 16 May. This will consist of various activities at both our Resource Centres (Haywards Heath and Worthing). Our audiologists will be on hand to offer 5 minute screening tests which will give an indication as to whether the person should see their GP for a referral to our NHS audiology service. We will also be demonstrating a range on assistive listening devices.

Hearing care provider The Hearing Company is offering free hearing checks at all 420 of its branches during this year’s Deaf Awareness Week.

The company wants more people to recognise the importance of regular checkups and take better overall care of their hearing.

Keith Willis, Managing Director of The Hearing Company, said: “ Hearing is one of our most vital but also most neglected senses. Nearly nine million adults in the UK have some level of hearing loss and over three million of them could enjoy better hearing with the help of a hearing aid if only they sought assistance.

“We are proud to offer free hearing checks in all our branches. It doesn’t matter whether there is a hearing loss present or not. What is important is that everyone has the health of their ears and their hearing levels checked on a regular basis.”

As well as providing free hearing checks, The Hearing Company has also pledged to donate £25 from every hearing aid sold during Deaf Awareness Week to the charity Hearing Dogs for Deaf People.

Money raised will help pay for new dogs to be trained at the charity’s facilities in Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire, and York.

For further information please contact Nick Trueman or Felicity Cross at Seal on 0121 616 5800

RNID will be raising awareness of all aspects of deafness during this year's Deaf Awareness Week (7-13 May).

The week will focus on the many different ways deafness and hearing loss can affect people's lives and includes:

We'll publish a new step on the website every day of the week, so keep checking to find out the next step at www.rnid.org.uk

In preparation for National Deaf Awareness Week, Teachers TV is showing a season of programmes examining some of the issues facing deaf and hearing impaired pupils in schools today.

How do you meet the needs of a deaf child in your class? And in what ways can mainstream schools achieve full inclusion for the hearing impaired?

Primary Special Needs: Hearing Impairment in Mainstream – Rosie’s World

Rosie attends Willingdon Primary in Eastbourne, a mainstream school with a Hearing Support Facility attached. The facility offers sign communication using a Total Communication Approach. That is to say a variety of communication methods encompassing oralism, lip reading, and British Sign Language.

Willingdon works hard to include Rosie in every aspect of school life. Rosie's class teacher, an NQT, has recently completed a deaf awareness course and is still learning how to accommodate a deaf child in his classroom.

This film actively explores the process of full inclusion for a hearing impaired child, and through Rosie's eyes, we get a clear insight into the teaching methods and support that help her to learn.

Emily is profoundly deaf. As her teacher says, "without her hearing aids she'd only just hear a pneumatic drill beside her". Yet she's doing well and set to get some good grades in her exams. This programme follows Emily through a school day, showing the support she needs to ensure she is able to access the curriculum and achieve alongside her hearing colleagues.

Welcome to My Deaf World

Bethany Rose and Scott Masterson are schoolmates, a couple of energetic and charming teenagers who share three things: Adolescence, school and deafness. We see deafness as a disability to be cured. But to Bethany and Scott, their deaf world is a rich culture of human possibility, with its own language, rules, challenges and inspirations.

Above all, it is about seeing, and dancing a language of profound gestural communication. It is a culture that few people know or fully understand. Welcome 2 My Deaf World follows Bethany and Scott through the last few months of their schooling at the Victorian College for the Deaf (VCD), Australia’s first school for deaf kids, and now the only place that teaches in sign language from Prep to Year 12.

With dreams of creative, sporting and academic success, both teenagers are eager to move beyond their sheltered lives and enter the wider world.

At the Royal School for the Deaf in Manchester, teacher Chloe Bedford works with pupils who have severe communication difficulties and multiple learning disorders in her primary class.

A multi-sensory approach is used to encourage communication. Objects of reference and picture exchange are some of the strategies Chloe uses in her class and she shows how sound and vibration are important in a Gamelan music lesson with percussion instruments.

Meanwhile, in a science class, pupils are exposed to a variety of tactile experiences to encourage a concept of pushing and pulling.

The Butterflies of Zagorsk

This is the story of the children who attend the deaf-blind school in Zagorsk, 40 miles North of Moscow. With its remarkable teaching methods, one former pupil Natasha has been able to succeed as a practicing child psychologist, a philosopher, poet and mother of two - in spite of being almost totally blind and deaf.

Primary Special Needs: Singing and Signing

It's morning assembly. Over 400 pupils and staff at Carden Primary School are singing and signing the school song. Carden is one of the few schools to use Makaton symbols and signs from British Sign Language throughout the school. With 44 per cent of pupils with SEN, the staff, all Makaton trained, have found the strategy invaluable for inclusion as well as being useful to the most able pupils.

This programme analyses how to implement school-wide signing and how it helps. Headteacher Lesley Corbett explains that it was the success of pupils in the school's Speech and Language Centre using signing that influenced her decision to introduce it into the mainstream.

Worth the Trip – The Bolton Museums

Lyn March and her pupils from St James C of E High School in Farnworth are on an art trip to The Bolton Museums, Art Gallery and Aquarium. While Ingrid McGregor and her pupils from Peterborough High School are on a citizenship trip to The National Centre for Deafblindness in Hampton.

Watch Teachers TV on Freeview 88 (11am-1pm), Sky 880, Virgin TV 240 and Tiscali TV 845

On Tuesday 8th May as part of the National Deaf Awareness week (from the 7th -13 May), members of Newcastle Deaflink wearing “Sound Off” Tshirts* 1 will be giving out leaflets challenge hearing people to turn the sound off on their TV’s, radios and i-Pods to experience what it feels like to be excluded from every day information that hearing people take for granted.

Newcastle Deaflink will be asking members of the public to send them their views on the services for deaf people. The findings of the survey will form part of a report on access issues which will be sent to Offcom.

Over the last 3 years Newcastle Deaflink have been raising awareness of the needs of the 19,000 deaf, deafblind and hard of hearing people in the city with the Local Council, Health ,Police and other public services. In a recent review of these services Newcastle Deaflink found that discrimination is still alive and kicking for this silent minority.

Newcastle Deaflink hope that this campaign will enable the hearing community to understand some of the many problems experienced by the deaf community and unite in calling for change.

Jo Bainbridge, Vice Chair of Deaflink, explained that the group want hearing people to exchange places with them for a while and see what it is like watching subtitles, especially on live programmes, like the news, where big chunks of information are missing.

“Turn the “Sound Off “ and switch to the analogue TV channel 888 and try watching your favourite programmes with subtitles for an hour, or a day or even the whole week! That’s what our members have a lifetime of. We think that people will quickly feel the frustration, anger and depression that many of our members feel because they know they’re missing out on important information all the time. We want to know the views of hearing members of the public. Please send us your views at newcastledeaflink@btconnect.com or better still write to the Evening Chronicle. There is a prize for the best feedback!”

The Sound Off” campaign is a local response to the National Deaf Awareness Week which has been organised by the UK Council on Deafness to highlight the needs of the deaf community. The UK Council on Deafness is a coalition of 100 organisations representing deaf people throughout the UK. Their national campaign, called ‘Look at Me!” is focussing on the many different methods of communication used by deaf people such as sign language, lip reading and Deafblind manual.

Nationally 15% of the population have some degree of deafness. 70,000 people in the UK use British Sign Language (BSL) as their first or preferred language. A further 2 million people in Britain wear hearing aids and almost all deaf and hard of hearing people rely on lip reading to some extent.

“Deaf people still face bad attitudes and discrimination when going for jobs, using health services or even just getting on a bus. When there’s an emergency deaf people cannot even use the 999 service because we can’t hear the service. That’s wrong! Surely in this day and age of new technology we should have a system where we have the same access as everyone else. We want this campaign to change people’s attitudes and become aware of how much information is unavailable to the deaf community.”

A new initiative funded by the Department of Health is set to improve the experience of healthcare for deaf people in England.

Several recent reports have highlighted that deaf people’s experiences of communication when they require healthcare is often disappointing, and at worst, puts them in danger of misdiagnosis or delay in treatment. The damaging effect to a deaf person of not being able to receive vital information or to communicate their needs effectively cannot be underestimated. Healthcare staff should be aware of the isolation and frustration that many deaf people experience in their dealings with services that make up the healthcare sector.

The RNID report – ‘A Simple Cure’ - found that “… 42% of deaf or hard of hearing people who visited hospitals in a non-emergency capacity, found it difficult to communicate with NHS staff. Over a third (35%) of deaf or hard of hearing people had been left unclear about their condition because of communication problems with their GP or nurse”.

A key conclusion of these reports is that this situation can be improved significantly by healthcare staff developing knowledge and skills in the use of simple communication tactics.

To meet this need, CACDP, a specialist awarding body/examinations board has developed the Level 1 Certificate in Communication Tactics with Deaf People to provide a nationally accredited standard of basic communication skills for healthcare staff who come into contact with some of the one in seven of the population who are deaf or hard of hearing. These may be patients, colleagues, service users, or friends or relatives of patients.

The funding from the Department of Health will provide a programme of Communication Tactics training, initially for up to four thousand NHS staff. The programme will be co-ordinated by the UK Council on Deafness.

Announcing the project at the commencement of Deaf Awareness Week 2006 (2-6 May), CACDP Chief Executive, Miranda Pickersgill said:

“Communication is a two way process, but for deaf people it is frequently an unequal one. This initiative has the potential to change that experience for deaf users of health services”.

2010 News

RNID Deaf Awareness Week 2010