 I bring the committee back to the second panel that we have this morning. We have Heather Gray, National Deaf Children's Society, Rachel O'Neill, Murray House School of Education, Dr Roger Cameron, Child Protection Research Centre and Catherine Finiston, British Association of Teachers of the Deaf Scotland. I welcome all of you this morning for attending. We are just going to go straight to questions and can I begin the questions with Mark Griffin? I wanted to go into questions around issues around teachers of the deaf in Schools in Scotland. Just kick off around the shortage, you would have heard it in written evidence from Aberdeen Council about the age profile of teachers of the deaf and the majority of qualified staff are in their mid to late ffifties to see whether they agree with that and what needs to be done now to bridge that gap between boosting the numbers to an acceptable level as the ultimate ambition but just covering for the staff who are going to be leaving the service in next 10 to 15 years. I trained 39 years ago and at that time the Government had ring-fenced funding and it meant that all local authorities had the opportunity to appoint people to go on the training. We did one full-time years course so people committed themselves to that year and became qualified. When the colleges and universities merged, they had to ensure that the modules were in line with the universities. It was done as a modular course, initially eight modules over a period of up to five years. Circumstances changed for people over five years. People get married, they have children, etc. At that time, there was also a monetary incentive to do the course. It was not a lot, I think it was in the region of £200 and something, but it was some incentive to do the qualification, whereas now there is no incentive. What you find is teachers who are extremely interested in working in deaf education apply for the courses. Some have to pay themselves, some have to go to authorities and ask for funding. If that is agreed, they continue with their day job and have to do the modules in addition to that, so it can take quite a lot of time and you do not get the same. It is only the people who really want to do the job that will commit themselves to that, but other people will not. It has caused a national shortage. When you advertise for teachers of the deaf, qualified teachers of the deaf, you rarely get any applicants. If you are lucky, you will get one. I would like to talk about the course from the university point of view, because I run the postgraduate diploma at Murray House. We have some people coming on the course quite in life, and we know that out there there are 30% of teachers working with deaf children who are unqualified, so local authorities are sometimes not sending us people. The people who come usually are highly motivated. One thing I would like to see is more deaf people coming forward, and that is quite a difficult thing, because getting through to becoming qualified as a teacher and then finding out about the possibilities once you are working in a local authority, mean we do not often get, for example, people with fluent sign language coming through. The age profile is quite old, that is true, but some authorities, I think that Falkirk is one of them, have made provision in advance by looking round for younger teachers, and Fife is another council who has done this as well, looking at for very good teachers who they see in mainstream and attracting those to a service and then sending them on the diploma. It depends on the authority's perspective. Small authorities, rural authorities struggle, I think, most. Dr Cameron? I mean, I think that some of the history about deaf teaching would be instructive at this point. There are so few teachers because deaf people are only allowed to become deaf teachers very recently, and it took a concerted amount of lobbying to change the rules to allow deaf people to train at all to become teachers of the deaf, and that is why we have got so few. One of the preconditions of becoming a qualified teacher was you had to be able to hear what was going on in the back of the classroom. Now clearly a lot of deaf people who are qualified and intelligent enough to become teachers weren't able to do so because of those rules, and I was one of those people. I'm very thankful for that rule change that allowed me to qualify, but if we're looking at why there's such a dearth of deaf people as teachers of the deaf, that's the reason. We need to make a concerted and proactive effort to build that share of the teacher of the deaf population that are deaf to a much higher level. Thank you. Just to think again about those statistics, there are 200 teachers of the deaf in Scotland according to the consortium for research and deaf education, and over a third of those are unqualified. We've seen through the cry report in the last few years quite a significant decline, so we know that over 50 per cent of teachers of the deaf will retire in 10 to 15 years. We also know that it is incredibly difficult to attract teachers because there isn't the incentives that Cathy spoke about, so the additional qualification does not bring with it any additional responsibility allowance, which I think is a major factor. I think that we have a piece of work to do in terms of promoting the work of teachers of the deaf and the huge impact that it has for children and how it can really transform children's lives too. I think that there is work to be done on really promoting the work of the teachers of the deaf and really starting to address this quite significant reduction that we're seeing and the difficulties in getting young people into the profession. I think that it's absolutely right that we should be supporting and encouraging more deaf young people to become teachers of the deaf. Interestingly, we've got three of our young campaigners that are interested in becoming teachers of the deaf and that is really important in terms of just giving young people the confidence to aspire to go into the profession. We have work to do on promoting the profession and the impact that it can have and the transformational change that it can make. Just to pick up on a point, Dr Cameron made about the qualifications of teachers of the deaf in particular with BSL. Currently, the standard is for BSL level one and I was struck by a comment that Dr Cameron said that previously teachers weren't allowed to teach unless they could hear what was going on in the back of the classroom, but a teacher who only has BSL level one won't know what his or her own pupils will be signing in the classroom, so surely they weren't qualified to be in the classroom either, which seems to be a disparity. What are your views on the level of BSL qualification that teachers have and what you think that could be the impact on pupils learning when some pupils have a much higher standard of BSL than the teachers themselves? Right, it's very unfair. It can have a serious detrimental impact on their learning. If the language that's been used by the person who's instructing them isn't clear and they have a low skill level of British Sign Language, simple mistakes can be made. If you think about the English term iron, FE in the scientific world as an abbreviation, and we've seen examples of people in the classroom using this sign for iron as in the thing that you iron your clothes with, those are the kind of mistakes that are being made and isolated deaf children in a mainstream environment are able to work out what that's supposed to be. It's crucial that the sign language is fluent and has a standard that allows the deaf child to conceptualise what they're learning. You talked, Mark, about level 1. We do a lot of work in the centre and at the university about developing science signs, but none of this knowledge is being transferred or it's not being replicated anywhere. There are such good examples of work going on, but what's clearly happening is that if the sign language standard in the school is not clear and it's not good enough, then the kids have got no chance of learning. When we develop these sign-signs together as a group, you're talking about a large group of experts from the areas of science, linguistics, all those areas coming together and doing enough of a lot of hard work just to get those concepts out in sign language. What we're doing at the Scottish Century Centre is helping teachers teach both deaf and hearing kids, because I'll give you an example. If you think about the concepts mass, does the committee know what mass is? Can you describe what mass of volume is? It's very difficult, isn't it, just through the English word? When you think about gravity, I'm sure you're all familiar with gravity. In sign language, the fist that I'm using here is the sign for mass. Everything's there. The gravity is the force that's acting on an object. We have this sign, gravity, as in to come down to earth. OK? As Mary quietly showed with the pen. If you put the two together, conceptually, visually, you have weight. That is what weight is as a concept. You can see how visually superior that is to try to explain something in English. Not only are deaf kids going to benefit if we can use sign language with them, everybody's going to benefit. Can you imagine trying to explain to a deaf child without the teacher of the deaf who might not be there in lip-speaking mass volume? They're not going to get it. If you've got somebody who can sign like that, then they're going to get the concepts immediately. So it's incredibly disappointing that we allow teachers of the deaf to qualify with only level 1 BSL. I quite agree. I think it's a great science lesson, Audrey. The work of the Scottish Science Centre Glossary is very important in telling teachers of deaf children and communication support workers about new signs and concepts that they can use. The current advice that we have from the government, and it's the government advice, is level 1, is the same all over the UK, and it is no way near enough for people who use sign language. What's more, it keeps teachers of the deaf assuming, that regulation keeps people assuming that most deaf children are not going to use much sign. In my submission, and in the submission from the British Deaf Association, we saw that actually there are larger numbers in children using some sort of sign than other parts of the UK. We know as well that teachers of the deaf, when they work with signing pupils, often how level 2 is what they regard as a good level. If you took to people in the deaf community, they are shocked by this because level 6 is regarded as a good level for people who are interpreting. Level 3 is seen as a minimum. When I say level 3, I mean something like a higher in a language. Now, if any of you have got a higher in a modern language, could you teach in it? That is the level which we're seeing as the minimum level for teachers of deaf children. Now, that's what I say to my students, that the government regulation says level 1, or more as appropriate, and that vagueness of the language more as appropriate is very unhelpful. So, I feel that in Scotland we're in an interesting position now with the BSL Bill, and I expect that guidance to be revised upwards. Whether it's revised for all teachers of deaf children, or whether it's revised for those teachers working with signing students and the under-fives, I don't know yet which way it will go. But I think that we've got to remember that when we're talking about the word deaf in the Scottish context, we're talking about two quite different groups of children. There is some overlap between them, and the signing pupils at the moment are not getting a good deal. Thank you. Can I just put this in a bit of perspective? 71 per cent of peripathetic hearing impairment services in Scotland don't have any teachers qualified to BSL level 3 or beyond, and there are actually six services in Scotland where there are teachers with no qualifications in BSL, so I think that gives a sense of the dimension really of the challenge that we face just now, too. We recently had a deaf learners conference, we had 21 BSL users at that conference, and they very strongly and clearly told us that they needed to have support, which was far more fluent than they currently had, if they were going to succeed and to really achieve their potential. I think that we really need to listen to the voices of those young people coming from that deaf learners conference and identify the need to do something about this, but those are certainly the statistics just now in relation to BSL qualifications and teachers of the deaf in Scotland today. Thank you, Mark. Colin Beattie. Can I start just with a little plea for plain English in some of the submissions? When I look at a sentence like part of the solution is to transmogrify the educator from adhering to the sophisticated deficit model to one that generates empowerment of the pupil, I can barely get it out. No, it's no one here. It's no one here. To be fair, I think, from one of the first panel members. Just for clarity. I don't think that it was end here. Anyway, I just plea for plain English. I was going to ask a little bit about some of the suggestions that have been made in terms of technology support and how that could best be introduced to give the biggest impact on pupils with hearing difficulties or sensory impairment. What would give the biggest hit? Well, where I am in Falkirk, we have sound field systems that we're installing into all the primary 1, 2 and 3 classes, into classes where we have children with unilateral losses, severe conductive losses, and we're finding that that's benefitting all of the children in the classroom. It's also benefitting the teacher because it helps the teacher's voice. You don't have to project it as loudly. All of the children, regardless of where they are in the class, get the same level of volume from the teacher. There are also modern radio aid systems that are discrete, and any of the children that we have that will benefit from a radio aid system will be supplied with one, but they cost about £1,000 each. We've had people writing and asking how we go about... There's a single teacher of the deaf in an authority, and they're saying how we go about getting a radio aid system and funding for that, or for a sound field system within our authority. It's very much at the hands of the education services whether there's funding for that. Is that the one major adaptation that you think would make a huge impact? I think that in technology children also have laptops. That would be the major one for us because it means that if they're wearing a radio aid system, regardless of where they are in the class, they will always hear the teacher's voice at the same volume and be tuned into what is happening. Just taking an example of what some local authorities do. For example, in my own Midlothian local authority, when schools are closed due to snow or in climate weather, children's homework is made available through smartphones or through the internet. How are sensory impaired children impacted by that? Does it disadvantage them hugely? Are there adaptations that could be done to that to enable them to carry on with their education? Children are able to access support through glow and that can roll out all of the children if the parent supply can be signed up for that. So there isn't a disadvantage there. Very often, if a child is ill or off, the parent will contact the school and ask for work to be sent home. The teacher will do her best to present challenging but homework that they're going to be able to cope with. If that's not possible, then the teacher of the deaf in our authority will go out and do a home visit and tutor the child. Technology is obviously very important, but what underlies that will be a bilingual education that empowers deaf children. If they're able to read, then they're going to be able to work from home, the same as any other child. If they're given language when they're born and they grow up confident using sign language and English in a bilingual way, then they shouldn't have any problems. They should be able to access the written English just the same as their hearing peers. If they're hearing peers, they shouldn't have to rely on technology for everything. I wanted to say about technology. I don't think that there's one technological hit that will solve the problem, because, as Audrey said, the issue mainly is access to an early language. In Scotland, what we need more of is educational audiologists. We don't have enough. Those people can make the technological adjustments that are needed in local authorities, especially if they were able to work across many local authorities. Authorities are reluctant to employ one because perhaps they don't have enough work for one, so it seems an obvious job to give an essential service such as the SSC to work in many local authorities. Those people can fit radio aid systems. They can advise on sound field systems. They can advise parents. They're very, very valuable. They're basically teachers of deaf children and, in Scotland, we need more of them. Is there an example of a local authority that employs one? Yes, five employs one. There is one freelance who's working across some local authorities in the west. Falkirk has got one. It's been hard to recruit as well, hasn't it? Yes. It's very difficult to recruit, because there are so few of them. Do we know how many there are through Scotland? Five. That's a significant reduction over the last few years. Often what we're seeing is if post-holders leave, those posts are not being replaced. That certainly was the case in Ayrshire and in the Lothian. We're seeing a reduction. One of the points I was going to make was just that of actually there's no point in having the technology if we don't have the expertise to use it properly. Again, a very strong message coming through from the deaf learners conference was a young people saying that the teachers don't know how to use technology. One of the young people gave this really funny incidence of where the teacher hadn't switched off the radio mic and the kids heard the whole conversation that went on in the staff room. It's quite a fundamental point, but our young people are telling us that it's critical that our staff actually know how to use the technology that we've got. On the reduction in educational audiologists, we need to ensure that there's a solution. Ayrshire has skilled up one of their teachers of the deaf to be a specialist. There are ways to do this, but it's clearly an issue that not everybody has the skills and expertise to use the technology that we do have properly. Is there any indication that councils are increasingly sharing that resource? No, the opposite actually is. At times of cuts, they're tending not to share. Obviously, we had an education audiologist based in Edinburgh who also worked with all the Lothians, and that has been not replaced because the authorities couldn't agree. The service has definitely deteriorated as a result. The children used to have excellent service from that education audiologist right the way through from 0 to 18. Sorry, can I see? I think one of the other difficulties is that there isn't any training for educational audiologists in Scotland. There isn't any of the universities that provide that. I think one other further point is there isn't actually any consistency between the audiologists that do exist in Scotland, so there isn't a job description for an educational audiologist. It's quite inconsistent, so... You have skill level. Well, the qualification is going to... Sorry, I'll do it. I mean, it does obviously make sense to have a better use of technology and also to centralise services across authorities and make good use of resources and not only hardware and software resources, but the people resources. Rather than seeing authorities wasting money trying to provide these services on their own, an economy of scale has to be able to be leveraged. Sorry, Rachel. Is that you, Colin? Okay, before we move on, I'm going to just take a short suspension at the moment for just a five-minute break, because you don't mind. Okay, we'll just move on now with Chick Brody. Thank you. Good morning. In the papers that we got, there's a quote from the Scottish Council on Deafness highlighting the importance of multi-agency information. The code is under the universal newborn hearing screening programme. Children are picked up in a hearing test that happens as part of health tests in the first six weeks. Now, we've heard at the earlier session in terms of vision impairment that we have no idea really as to... There is a spectrum, of course, but no idea of the actual numbers that are involved. We're told as far as hearing is concerned that screening is recorded within the NHS databases at a local level, but our understanding is that this information has not always shared effectively across the different services, potentially creating missed opportunities for early interventions and support for the children and families. Do you agree with that? Fundamentally, we need to know how many children we're dealing with for early intervention, for starting the language learning process, something crucial for a deaf baby to have access to a visual language really from as close to day one as we can get it, so it's very important. I have other concerns about the newborn screening test. My personal experience when I had a baby myself, we were given that because both my husband and I are deaf, the test was administered the next day. I knew that she was hearing instinctively, I thought that everything was going to be fine, and straight away the person said, oh no, we're going to refer your baby straight away to a speech and language therapist, even though they're perfectly hearing. I thought, well, hang on a second, you don't know my background, you don't know who I am. I'm from a hearing family, I grew up with a hearing family myself. My daughter, who is now 10, is fluently bilingual, by the way, so none of those fears, she speaks just as clearly as everybody else, but I can imagine what their attitudes are going to be like with hearing parents who have a deaf baby the other way around. I was upset, my daughter had just been born, it's the day after. I put myself into the hearing parents position, and I think that the health services and settings need to know how to work with the social side of things, having positive role models, getting deaf adults in there, not to have this negative attitude of, oh dear, your child's deaf, and seeing it as a necessarily negative thing, but the health services do need to be plugged in, but they also need to be making parents aware of all the different life possibilities and all the different avenues that their deaf child can undertake and to know that deaf people do regularly strive for and achieve their dreams in many walks of life. That's very helpful, but I suppose that the most important people that we've talked about, teachers are very important, the curriculum is very important, the methods are very important, but at the end of the day, the parents are absolutely critical from day one. What measures would you support in terms of improvements in multi-agency working to support parents from day one and in the early years? Rachel? I'd just like to refer you to the Scottish Century Centre Early Years Standards, which were developed by a group of practitioners and parents in 2011, and they set out ways that the agencies can work together, seeing the parents at the centre of the team. That attitude about putting the parents at the centre is quite difficult for some agencies to realise. We know we've got the benefit of newborn screening in Scotland, and we've got good pediatric standards, but these standards are not statutory. Education Scotland does not assess with them at all and doesn't actually assess early years services. We know many of those early years services are very, very successful. Angus, for example, has got a very successful service. It's a small authority, but they have got age-appropriate language for all deaf children who have been or nearest to age-appropriate from the age that screening started and as they go on more and more. What they're not getting from newborn screening is mildly deaf children. They are picked up. Children have got mild deafness, but they're not referred straight away. Those sorts of things could be improved a great deal. These guidelines could be made statutory. Education Scotland, HMIE could inspect them. Also, if you look at the BDA recommendations about an early years sign-intensive environment, that could also be very useful for establishing bilingual education for many deaf children because it's an advantage for everybody to have a bilingual experience. I like the way they suggested about having a resource space with a reasonable number of deaf children and deaf adults signing or hearing adults who can sign very fluently. Having a fluent language before you have an implant or having exposure to a fluent language before you have an implant is an example of the signs that you know on to spoken English very well. Deaf children from deaf families do best out of any group when they have an implant because they already have a language before. Early exposure to two languages is a good thing, but it's very hard to organise. That's why I quite like the BDA's response where they were looking in practical detail about how agencies and authorities could co-operate to make that happen. Those are the two steps that I would suggest. Implement those and make them something that HMIE can inspect. Remember the parents at the centre and establish early years bilingual environments. We did have two pilots for local records of deaf children in both Lothian and Tayside which was set up at the back of universal newborn screening and which was all about sharing information and making sure that services were working together. One of the things that we've called for is that we have a national roll-out of that because it creates that environment where services are working together and we're using the information from universal newborn screening to make sure that professionals and services are working together. I would say that what's critical for parents remembering that 90 per cent of parents are hearing who have a deaf child is the role that the third sector can play. All the things that around about deaf role models making sure that parents have impartial advice making sure that there's someone there to navigate them through what can be a really challenging difficult time. GERFEC provides the perfect framework for that but we need to make sure that we're progressing in terms of those GERFEC pathways and that services are truly working together and that parents have got that very practical impartial advice from other parents. Our family support service covers every authority in Scotland our family support workers our parents of deaf children and the kind of practical emotional support is really really important too. I think that there are solutions there and there are things that we know and have learned from the past that we can roll out to improve how services work together and how we can make sure that within that pathway parents get support from other parents. supplementary on that point and I'm grateful to you for raising it. The paragraph 5.1 in the national deaf children's evidence despite the introduction of the universal newborn health screening in 2005 the Scottish Government has not yet published any guidance in terms of post-diagnostic and subsequent early years support for children and families resulting in considerable implications for long term education I hear what Rachel O'Neill mentioned about coming together, but why has it taken 10 years for the Government to produce nothing after the introduction of this universal newborn health screening in 2005? We have got standards, but we don't have them. Government hasn't published, that's what I'm talking about. I think probably it might have been because newborn screening was seen in a very health-orientated way, and there are actually pediatric standards which are very good, but they don't involve what happens next, which is talking to a teacher, talking to language role models. The implementation of the screening has been seen almost entirely as a health issue, and it's obviously not. When you say has not published guidance, I won't repeat what I've said, did you expect them to publish guidance, that's what I'm reading into it, or does the guidance not matter? That's what I'm not understanding. I think guidance is absolutely critical, and I think we've been working on it for 10 years. I think for the reasons that Rachel's describing in terms of health, sorry Audrey. I was just going to say, nobody's listening to deaf people? Perhaps is the reason? Nobody's listening to us? I think we are listening today. I did pick up the, it was Audrey that started on that point, and to be fair I have picked that up. Oh no, the inference was that the Government hasn't been listening for 10 years. All I'm asking, convener, is the Government's guidance in terms of early year support and information, is it critical going forward in terms of support, attainment, etc. for deaf children? Rachel? I'd like to discuss this because I think it is critical. In some local authorities in Scotland there are not enough teachers of the deaf or not enough qualified teachers of the deaf. Occasionally, rather regularly, you hear about children who are language-less at five or six, which is far too late. They are referred at birth, but perhaps they might be getting, I have heard examples quite recently of somebody being aided at three and a half and they've been referred at birth. Nothing much had happened in the meantime. The reason why we need these standards is because there is inconsistency between authorities and some authorities have got very proactive staff, go on extra courses, read a lot, understand the early monitoring protocol which we have, which is English materials about the development of early sign and speech, and they're implementing them, they're monitoring very carefully. Other authorities say to me, I've heard one person say to me, what is the monitoring protocol? Now, that is just shocking. I mean, those children haven't got a chance. Language-less children should not exist, but unfortunately in deaf, well, we meet language-less children, of course they're not going to achieve academically. One of the problems is language-less children often exist in rural areas and they're not allowed to get to a place where they can see sign language used. Yes, Audrey. I'd have to say quite, it's a little bit sad. I mean, I've met language-less people who don't live in the rural area, you know, who are in, you know, urban areas, and it does come back to the fact that the teachers and the support staff that they meet don't know how to sign, their parents don't know how to sign to a significant standard. So what chance do they have, in a sense? But I wouldn't mind going back just quickly to the newborn screening issue. There has been some research from Leeds. I'm sorry, I can't remember the name of the researcher about the emotional attachment with baby. Because of the attitude of health professionals at the point of diagnosis, it doesn't allow either the mother or the father to really effectively bond with their child and celebrate, you know. I mean, everybody's always after the perfect healthy baby, is what we're told. And the screening obviously has an advantage because it picks these things up early. But what it does, of course, is it can run the risk of the parents detaching from the child, starting to feel guilty immediately about that. And no matter what we think, babies pick up on that. They pick up on that quite clearly. So we should be straight away providing a positive environment for those parents saying, look, you know, here's a language that you can access that your child can access. Straight away. Before the newborn screening programme, ironically, parents had that time to bond with their child. My parents didn't know that I was deaf until I was nine months old. But that bond and the love had already been established. That affirmation for me as a human being had already been made. I wasn't seen as deficient or disabled immediately. So a lot more has got to be done in that area to give parents this positive experience rather than an, oh dear, your child's death and everything's negative. And to see it as something that necessarily needs to be repaired. Mary, do you want to move on to... Yes, only one question. That's fine, okay. My questions were actually on data collection and attainment, but so I'll just go to one question and that is our briefing from the Parliament today looks at positive destinations for school leavers with a hearing impairment. So if I look at those with no additional support needs, it's 91.7 and with a hearing impairment, 89.4, which on paper doesn't look too bad. If I just go to further education with no additional support needs, the follow-up destination is 22.5 and with a hearing impairment, 41. Now as an economist I know that below these figures there are many stories to tell, but if you'll forgive me, taking a rough glance at these figures, they look quite good. I find it hard to believe that that's the full story and I would perhaps ask you if positive destinations entry into further education, I have to say higher education is about half for people with a hearing impairment, but behind these figures look quite good, behind the figures are there any concerns you would like to raise with us today? I think you're right to pick out about the difference between further education and higher education, a larger proportion of deaf children go on to further education rather than higher, it's practically reversed, which the reason is largely because of the English level. The research that we've done recently at the University of Edinburgh, the achievements of the Nuffield Foundation funded research about the achievements of deaf pupils in Scotland showed that there were two areas of concern and I showed them in the graph that I put in my submission, which was the English results at S4. You can't see this, but S4, you've got all the levels of deafness category from people with cochlear implants to mildly deaf, profoundly deaf, severely deaf, deaf performing much worse at S4 in English, and then when you get the high flyers, those who you'd expect to be going to university getting level 5 when they're in S4. Again, drastically different results, I mean all the different categories of deafness performing much worse. Now this is because, it must be because of early language experience and also the experience they have right the way through school in support and access to language and the curriculum. So data collection is very important. The other group that I would want to concentrate on is those who leave school with very low level qualifications or no level, no qualifications, which is about 16%. And much, much higher. With a level 3 SEQF qualification, you really can't get onto a very decent college course. So that group of children need much more examination. Who are they? And I expect that many of them are from impoverished backgrounds, which we unfortunately have come to expect in the UK. And many of them would also be probably the language-less children that I talked about before. And many of them perhaps have been unfortunate enough to grow up in areas where they didn't have access to sign language and were profoundly deaf, or they didn't have very good acoustic conditions. So that group of children who achieve poorly, getting SEQF level 3 and below when they leave school, need more study and we need to find out who they are and we need to put targets in, not when they're 16, that's far too late. We need the early years environment and I would say mildly deaf children as much as profoundly deaf children need that support early on. I am concerned in Scotland at the moment about the speech and language therapy cuts, which seem to be very widespread, and I think that the whole range of deaf children in the early years need extra support, much better support from multi-agency groups. I think just to add to what Rachel was saying about that, there is a need for support, but there is also a desperate need for research about what's actually going on in the classroom. When we have got successful learners, why are they successful? What's going on with them? We talk about not enough communication support workers, not enough teachers of the deaf, not enough qualified people there, that's fine, but we do need to find out what's going on in the classroom. I suspect that we are often finding mainstream teachers with one deaf child in their class and perhaps having a teacher of the deaf or a communication support worker or a CSW coming in for a certain amount of time a week and running what is essentially a macro class within the larger class. The classroom teacher isn't directly teaching the deaf child. They're devolving that responsibility to someone else who may not be qualified to deliver that education. I've seen this in evidence myself. There's no way you can expect a child to behave normally in that situation. Of course they're going to be disruptive, they're going to be distracted, they're going to look at the window, they're not going to be paying attention because they're detached from the rest of the class. They're existing within this macro environment, so there's no follow-up from the teacher directly. They're not enjoying anywhere near the level of access to education that all the other kids are, so this inclusive education is actually exclusive. I've been following four deaf children to try and ask them why they don't get involved in asking the teacher questions. That interactive part of someone's education experience is one of the most crucial parts of their learning. We've identified that often the classroom teachers, when they ask a question to the class, as we've seen on the panel today, can put up their hands a lot faster. It's actually 1.2 seconds is all you've got on average before the first kid's hand goes up. When you've got a communication support worker who isn't qualified, how are they supposed to keep the deaf child up, speed up our teacher the deaf even? I've seen teachers of the deaf, I've seen one of them saying, oh, don't worry about it, I'll write it down for you later, I'll tell you later. They don't stand a chance, and therefore the children don't stand a chance, and that's why they're not getting anything out of this supposedly inclusive. What would be better is if we had children in smaller group environments interacting directly with a teacher that was qualified and skilled in the necessary language and cultural aspects to deal with them, not education through a third party. So that deaf children are involved in class discussions, involved in debates, they know what's going on in the whole classroom and they're not feeling isolated as they currently are. We talk about a holistic education experience and life skills and habilitation skills, but we're falling woefully short on all of those measurements when it comes to deaf children. The first step to improving that is to have a look at what's actually going on in the classrooms today, and we don't have an idea, we don't have a picture of that yet. It wouldn't be acceptable, I mean would you take it if it was your child? Would you accept that education for your child? A lot of the communication support workers that are providing the access, they don't have subject knowledge and they don't have fundamentally and crucially the language skills to perform their job. How can you interpret physics if you can barely sign? We need to look at what's going on in the classrooms today. This is one of the reasons why NDCS has been calling on an aspect review of deaf education, because what we've seen and what has come through our research are pockets of excellent practice where this has done exceptionally well in Scotland and other areas where it's incredibly poor. Because teachers of the deaf, who are largely the teachers supporting young people in the mainstream, are not routinely inspected, we do not have a national picture of the quality of support that's going in. I'll repeat it again today. We believe very strongly that what we now need is a full aspect review of deaf education so that we can identify where practice is really good and really learn from it and share that best practice and really get to grips with where it is just not working well. I want to talk about the independence of people who are at school and how we get that. I had asked some questions about the habilitation skills in the first panel, which I will do, but I wanted to start with Dr Cameron's evidence. Dr Cameron, you finished with the sentence in the last paragraph. What we need is a system for gathering data on the achievements of deaf pupils. I was wondering what that system would look like and what do you believe the achievements would be? I feel that the achievements in Scotland would be woefully bad and inadequate. I think that's what the picture would be. I had to go to England myself to get a decent education, so I had to travel from Scotland and I had to go down there. When you talk about that system, what we need to do is take in the whole picture, not just the child's understanding of a subject. You talk about confidence, habilitation skills, independent skills and all that stuff that we see in the curriculum for excellence. It's simply not happening for deaf children. We have some isolated individual success stories, but it's by no means predictive. Often what we see is in that situation that there has been extra payments made either by the family or the school or somewhere to get extra communication support for that child. It comes down to money. If it was a hearing child not receiving the same standard of education as they appear, parents would be outraged, but we seemed to find it acceptable for deaf children. That's the number of the question. To what extent habilitation skills have been provided across the country, do we know that? Has anyone got an idea of who is doing more if it is in mainstream schools, independent schools or special schools? Have we got any idea across the country as to what is happening? I suppose in my job I am lucky that I am able to visit a lot of schools and do placement visits and read placement files, so in some way I have got an idea. I'm not saying it's a complete picture. There are many really good things happening in supporting. We don't usually use the term habilitation in deaf education, but I know what you mean in visual impairment terms. In terms of deaf education, I suppose independence, resilience and confidence. I think that the NDCS has done some very good work in this area. When I look at children who are coming to events, for example, which sometimes have events at the Scottish Century Centre for Pupils, the places where there is a resource base school, I see much more confidence. I see in some areas of Scotland deaf studies being a subject in itself, and I don't mean just big D deaf studies only focusing on sign language, but talking about the experience of being deaf and having the chance to reflect on that experience and seeing yourself as a potential deaf adult who is likely to sometimes want to use signs and sometimes want to use speech in different circumstances, understanding the situation of deaf people and understanding what they need to do to make hearing people work better with them. That sort of self-confidence assertiveness training is done in some places and you can see the results when you get groups of deaf children together. I must say that Folkirk is one of those places where I've seen deaf students being very confident and talk out and be aware about who they are. You've got deaf adults in that school, haven't you? I think that the proof is in the pudding there. I think that that helps a great deal because a lot of deaf children amazingly think that they're going to become hearing when they grow up. They still walk around with that fallacy because they never meet a deaf adult throughout their whole childhood. We have a deaf sign language tutor, but we often have lots of our former pupils coming back and talking to the children and being involved with what they're doing. Anytime we have a deaf adult in the school, we always invite them down right to the primary classes to make sure that they're aware. We do surveys with the very young primary children asking, are you deaf or are you hearing? What do you think that person is? Are they deaf or are you hearing? How do they communicate? Do they wear hearing aids? It's a much more natural environment. The children that come back praise the education that they've had in Windsor Park because we care very much about each individual child's needs and try to address those needs as best we can. What we're seeing here is a clear need for an environment where a deaf-friendly environment, a signing environment, is not an environment that isolates the child. Dr Cameron, you made a comment that echoed what Dominic Everett said in the previous panel about the scope within curriculum for excellence to address some of those things. His concern was then that there wasn't space and capacity within the system to allow some of the habilitation to take place. I wonder if similar issues arise in relation to the independence and resilience that you were talking about, Rachel. We got on to a discussion about whether or not the presumption of mainstreaming was actually the way in which it was implemented and interpreted was actually working against the interests of, in the previous discussion, those with sight impairments and whether there's a similar issue in relation to those with hearing impairment. I think you'd say that mainstreaming isn't working at all in that regard. You can see why wanting to include deaf people in society sounds like a great thing. It doesn't sound like a bad thing at all in theory, but the actual experiences that are becoming more isolated are more vulnerable in the mainstream than they ever have been before. Teachers of the deaf might be able to visit once a week, in some cases once a month, an hour a day. What are the kids doing the rest of the time in school? What's happening all the other hours? If you've got a deaf resource centre based within a larger school where you've got that critical mass to enable confidence independence, I think that we can get through all of the curriculum for excellence. There shouldn't be any barriers to learning if we provide the right learning environment. I've met deaf people who know a number of languages. There's no reason that deaf people can't even learn French, Japanese, physics, any subject. If the language base is there, if the education is accessible, then they can achieve on a par with their hearing peers. To drop them in the mainstream with no support or inadequate support is shameful. One doesn't like to think about the mental health implications that must arise from the anxiety that these young people must feel going through that experience. Deafness is not a learning disability, and that's an important point to bear in mind. I mean, I was going to say that the visit to winter park school was evidence that, where it works, it can work extremely well. Therefore, I suppose the question is, does that give us confidence that we should be able to make that work across the piece, perhaps by concentrating resource in some respects? Or will we need to tailor things in an urban setting compared to a rural setting? I mean, I had a previous panel talk about the lack of provision at all in my constituency in Orkney, and that comes as no surprise to me. Recruitment can present real difficulties in some rural areas. Is there a danger that we try to fix this with a one-size-fits-all and end up coming up with solutions that really aren't going to work in different parts of the country? I'm really glad that you asked that question. I caught it on the monitor downstairs, as you were asking it to the previous panel. I think that the standards in Scotland schools leading to the presumption of mainstreaming does some deaf children a real disservice because of the fact that they can risk falling into this category of language. Also, as Audrey explained very clearly about mental health implications of being different, isolated and not involved in the classroom. The research that we did suggested that it would benefit local authorities if they co-operated and set up resource-based schools where you have a peer group. That can work for children who sign as well as children who use speech. DL High School is a very good example of a successful resource-based school where children achieve. If you notice that DL is in the top 50 secondary schools for Scotland, according to the Herald's league table, and it's got more than you'd expect of children from deprived backgrounds, then the success rate is good. Having a mass of children, I mean I don't necessarily think that it's good that DL only uses speech because I can't see nowadays why we need to just have that approach, but the fact is that it's an achieving school, it's a school where parents want their children to go. Parents of deaf children are very happy when their children get into DL. They achieve well. Resource-based schools are a good idea. Obviously, it's easier to work out in central Belden than in the rest of Scotland, but rural authorities could collaborate and did, in the past, collaborate. For example, Aberdeenshire used to send children into Aberdeen city where they have a school. They don't anymore. That's where you have a risk, I think, and it's perfectly possible for those local authorities to collaborate more. We have to consider, as part of that, boarding schools. Children still go to a school, Mary Hare, notably in England, where they go to very successfully. Usually, they go home at the weekend, but some people find it heartbreaking in today's context to being away from your parents, but I'm grateful to my parents for taking that brave step and providing me with the education that I required. If they hadn't done that at the time and hadn't made that move, I certainly wouldn't have got my doctorate and I wouldn't be sitting here in front of you. Perhaps the Harry Potter books have made boarding more attractive to 21st century pens. I don't know, but that's what my experience is like. That's what my school is like, being at Hogwarts. Exactly where I'll deaf. It's still magical. I thank the panel for coming along this morning and giving up your time to come and speak to us and give us your evidence. It's been very helpful. This is obviously the start of a short inquiry into sensory impairment to go along with the bigger inquiry on attainment that we're doing. I also think that it fits very well into some of the work that we've done with Mark Griffin's bill on BSL. Once again, I thank Andy Carmichael very much for all his efforts. It's through him that we can do this so well. Thank you.