to think sign language should be taught in schools?

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I was chatting with my friend the other day, and i'm actually wondering why kids don;t learn this as standard?

In primary kids will be taught French (for example) but not BSL/Makaton? Baby Signing is around and about, seems shame it's not continued in schools.

@DressingGownofDoom then maybe there is a happy medium?

Id be more concerned with the fact that so many deaf people do not get a full education as it is, let alone to degree level so how are we going to find all these deaf schoolteachers? Or are we going to just have hearing teachers doing it as a sort of lipservice
I do think more people should sign, but its less useful for most people than a foreign language

@bobbiedraper Scotland? Well you have your own separate system and budget, for education, don't you? Primary may be well funded, but I believe post 16 is a bit of a problem...

BSL and Makaton are completely different things. BSL is a complete language. Makaton is for people with learning disabilities.

If you learn BSL you can only use it with people who also know it. That's about 50K BSL users in the UK. If you learn French, for example, you can use it to talk to 67 million people in France and 12 million people in French-speaking Canada.

That's about 50K BSL users in the UK.

That’s a typo for 150k isn’t it?

It seems like a good idea to teach BSL to everyone but I wonder how many deaf BSL users you have met in your everyday life where it would be useful to know BSL? In fact most hard of hearing people rely on lip reading.
I am sure however that you will meet HOH or deaf people every day. You may not even notice that they struggle to hear or understand you as they either lipread or just pretend to hear what you are saying to save their embarrassment. ( or you assume they are stupid or have MH issues)
It would be far better to teach Deaf Awareness in schools to learn the many ways they can help Deaf and hard of hearing people in everyday life.
I do know what I am talking about as I was born hearing so my speech and vocabulary is the same as anyone else but since my late teens my hearing has gradually deteriorated and I am now profoundly deaf. I rely heavily on lipreading along with hearing aids.

[quote BobbieDraper]@noblegiraffe

You dont need to remove anything and schools have budgets to pay for people to come in an run clubs.

I'm 31, so I was in high school a while ago. They taught sign language. It was a lunch time class held in the library. They had to move it to the big hall because so many kids went; the majority of kids in the school went to it. It was only for 40 minutes once a week but we loved it.[/quote]
What budget? You do realise that many schools are running at a deficit.

Noble is correct is saying the curriculum is already very full.

@PurpleDaisies

and maybe we don;t need to be fluent in BSL, but enough to make ourselves understood would be enough?

While that would be lovely, it would be much more realistic and useful to teach communication strategies instead. Deaf people are used to dealing with non BSL proficient hearing people every day. How do you think they manage in everyday life otherwise?

Handing out a print out of a powerpoint doesn't make communicating as understandable as actually having to interpret what somebody is telling you in BSL. Until you have either tried to do that or acquire hearing loss of your own, you just don't appreciate what it's like to try to engage in conversation with somebody in a place with background noise, where they mumble, turn their head away, put their hands in front of their face or speak so quickly that you can't make out the words nor lipread them.

It's like telling somebody how to swim without ever having set foot in a swimming pool yourself.

And D/deaf people struggle. Bus drivers shout at them because they can't hear what is being said behind the perspex screen and their face is turned away, cancellations and changes are announced but not put up on displays, displays don't work properly, YouTube closed captions are nonsensical and loop systems can pick up background noise that is of no concern to the speaker, but are impossible to access by the D/deaf person.

Every part of society tells them that they don't belong, that they are not an effective part of society and have no culture, other than to be the butt of jokes and people pretending to say something.

Children are dismissed as not having a hearing problem, they've just not grown up in a hearing household, so teachers are advised to make a point of covering their mouth to force the child to listen. Yes, really.

Exams are carried out with invigilators speaking the instructions and not being told there is a D/deaf candidate who will not hear them when they say it's time to stop. Fire alarms aren't all accompanied by flashing lights.

BSL is as much a language of this country as English, Welsh, Gaelic and Cornish are.

There are around 35,000 - 50,000 school children who are D/deaf or have hearing loss (depending upon the source). Nine million adults are deaf or hard of hearing, some from birth/childhood, some lose hearing later in life, 70,000 - odd with Tinnitus.

Yes, we should be adding BSL skills to the curriculum. It'll improve communication skills as well, not just for those D/deaf from infancy, but for people who go on to lose part or all of their hearing later in life. RoI teachers have to be able to teach Gaelic, so why not add BSL as a requirement for teachers and children?

After all, employment opportunities aren't as widely available to D/deaf people. How about creating some instead of saying 'well, they just have to integrate and manage by themselves'?

It would be nice for it to be taught in some way, my son is hearing impaired and we use BSL, hes five and is pretty good at it, hes certainly better than me.

But generally educating society on the effects of hearing impairments would be a good start. Its amazing how many people think a hearing aid enables someone with a hearing impairment to hear. No, its just amplifies virtually everything unless you can drop £10k for decent aids.

Even medical professionals don’t seem to be aware, I always say he is hearing impaired even though his aids are visible. Yet we have still had nurses and doctors turn away when speaking to him, repeatedly rub their face etc failing to realise that not only are their lips now not visible but it muffles their voice.

Until you have either tried to do that or acquire hearing loss of your own, you just don't appreciate what it's like to try to engage in conversation with somebody in a place with background noise, where they mumble, turn their head away, put their hands in front of their face or speak so quickly that you can't make out the words nor lipread them.

Actually, people with auditory processing difficulties may well have the same problems, except their hearing is fine - it’s just the message gets scrambled.

@purpledaisies no, I used to work in the disability field and that was the figure we used and it was considered a 'campaigning' figure, in other words a rounded up number.

I don’t know why you’ve directed that at me @MitziK. I’m obviously on your side and I’d love BSL to be taught properly in schools. I don’t think we’re in a position for that to happen right now though. I was absolutely never advocating for a box ticking deaf awareness PowerPoint style thing and I don’t know where you’ve got that from. Ive said I’d love deaf teachers to be visiting schools to teach BSL.

Do you really think all our hearing non BSL using primary school teachers are in a position to start teaching it to their classes?

I totally agree that the way the education system treats deaf children is shameful, from teachers of the deaf with just level 1 BSL qualifications, communication support workers who are woefully underqualified or woefully underpaid if they do happen to be properly BSL proficient, mainstream teachers who don’t know or care about the deaf kids in their class and massive cuts to SEND funding. The situation is terrible.

I don’t think adding BSL to the NC necessarily solves any of that though.

I think this sounds great but I imagine that it won't be a priority for funding as it is such a small section of society that uses BSL. I did level 1 BSL 12 years ago and I've never yet met a BSL user in my day to day life and I'm a health professional. Admittedly this may be because I live in a small town in the north of Scotland.
I have however met many people using makaton and as the signs are so similar it has been useful to know some signs.

When DD was in reception, there was a boy with quite a few additional needs in her class. The teacher taught the class some sign language as it was the only way they could communicate with him, it was lovey.

He didn't go up to Y1 with the class and stayed in reception for a few years, and I think went into a special school afterwards.

I've been saying this for ages!!!

My youngest is two and seems to really enjoy learning new signs and as a family it's kind of rubbed off on us. I don't understand why it's not an option at school.

Very well said @MitziK (from the parent of a 3.5 year old who is deaf and uses BSL and SSE, and has cochlear implants).

There isn't enough time in the school curriculum to teach this.
Laudible as it may be.

I've always thought this, along with basic first aid.

I was taught some BSL/Makaton in school and I still remember it well....even though it was 30+ years ago.
My brother & my best friend remember it too. None of us are deaf or have anyone in the family that’s deaf.
It was a regular school and no-one my class (infact, the school) was actually deaf. We just had someone come in for a couple of afternoons and teach the class it.
All schools should do this. In fact, I’m surprised they don’t.

Deaf awareness teaching would be great.

Thing is, there's nowhere near the number of BSL teachers for the number of people who want to learn it (to the extent that parents of deaf kids can't always get lessons), so it's never going to get made compulsory any time soon. I think they have finally created a BSL GCSE, which would be a great start (hopefully some teachers of evening classes could also teach in school hours).

Teaching accessibility in general, not just deaf awareness, might be a place to start. It was the sort of thing covered in Assembly when I was at school, followed by PSHE.

BSL is a fascinating language but it's not going to be the communication solution for everyone with hearing loss, many who will want to use written English, etc. I sign a bit (did half of level 2) but it hurts my hands to do (I can't do ASL at all as I can't make most of the letter shapes), and terps have told me they couldn't manage the specialist terms of my work - so I use email, typing on laptops, note-takers and some speech-to-text reporters, instead.

@MitziK

"D/deaf"

Could you explain this terminology?

What is SSE? My 7 year old has glue ear and we do makaton with him and so does his teacher. Is this wrong? Should we be teaching him BSL? I'm ashamed to admit that the only BSL I know is finger spelling the alphabet. There was a mum at toddler group who was deaf and we communicated with a mixture of makaton, fingerspelling BSL and writing things down.

I think it's a good idea to teach signing in schools but I've no idea how it would work, whether it should be a club or included in lessons or whether it should be makaton or BSL.

As for learning BSL in schools. Like any language, you must be immersed in it to remember how to hold a conversation in it.

Exactly. I took classes for a year and got my Level 1 qualification (I've never been as nervous about an exam in my life!)
But if you don't use it, you lose it. Very quickly. It's not like you can retain the knowledge by reading like you can with a foreign language. If you don't know any deaf people or other signers, then you have no way of keeping up with it. I was lucky to be able to use it at work to a degree.

Learning it at school over a few lessons would be absolutely useless. Even after weekly lessons for a year (and a ton of practice at work) the sort of conversation I could have had with a deaf person would still have been incredibly basic.

All schools should do this. In fact, I’m surprised they don’t

How many BSL teachers do you think there are? You seem to think that BSL trainers are all sitting at home all day waiting to be invited to randomly teach in every school. In fact the majority have jobs, and do their teaching in the evenings.

....also @skyblue, 30 years ago the school curriculum wasn't so packed and highly assessed. There simply isn't room for all these extras unless the school day is extended by an hour or two.