Deaf children are invisible to social work teams and that puts them at serious risk

Where responsibility for deaf children was held by children with disabilities teams, in more than half of those councils there were no workers with any specialist knowledge of deaf children, including how to communicate with them. Among those who did have workers with some specialist knowledge, it was generally basic.

Only a fifth of local authorities had retained any kind of specialist team or team arrangement with responsibility for deaf children.

The widespread lack of a specialist social work service for deaf children tends to be justified on three counts. The first is that social work and social care is not a universal service in the same way as education, which provides teachers of the deaf, and health, which provides audiologists. By contrast, social work services are more of an "if it's needed" kind of service to which other professionals might refer. That might sound plausible if the pathways of referral between health or education and social care were clear. However, of the local authorities that participated in our study, 54 per cent said they had no formal referral arrangements between social work and education professionals, while 45 per cent had no formal referral arrangements between social work and health professionals. Indeed, in 46 per cent of the authorities, there were no systematic arrangements for ensuring that deaf children and their families receive a joint assessment involving health, education and social care.