World Hearing Day: Deaf children lobby government to fund early intervention support

To mark World Hearing Day (3 March), Auditory Verbal UK (AVUK) is launching its #HearUsNow campaign calling on MPs and organisations to back investment to make auditory verbal therapy available to all deaf children.

• Feature: How therapy helps deaf children get a better start

• Blog: Supporting families of deaf children online

Currently, AVUK is the only UK-based charity offering the specialist family-centred programme to support deaf children to learn to listen and speak. 

Despite research from the charity showing that four out of five children who attend AVUK for two years achieve the same spoken language outcomes as hearing children, just eight per cent of 7,200 deaf children in the UK have access to this support. 

Anita Grover, chief executive at AVUK, warns that without access to early intervention programmes like auditory verbal therapy, deaf children face “the prospect of lower academic achievement, lower employment, and are at higher risk of poor mental health, bullying and social exclusion”.

She added: “#HearUsNow highlights our vision to raise the expectations and opportunities for deaf children. 

“Early support should be available for all deaf children whether their parents choose to communicate with spoken language, sign language or a combination. We want to enable all families who wish their child to develop spoken language to have the opportunity to access an auditory verbal programme through publicly funded services. To do that we need to increase the number of specialist auditory verbal therapists working in the NHS and local services.”

Government investment of £2m per year over 10 years would enable a rapid expansion of AVUK’s internationally accredited training programme which enables speech and language therapists and teachers of the deaf in the NHS and local authority sensory services to train in this specialist approach which is part of mainstream provision in countries including Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the charity says.

Case study

Beatrice Cadman is among the deaf children backing the campaign.

She was diagnosed with hearing loss at her newborn hearing screening and attended AVUK’s auditory verbal therapy programme as a child.

Now 18 years old, Beatrice is completing her A Levels and has applied to study midwifery at university.

She said: “It has always been instilled in me that I can do anything I want to and I’m so grateful that AVUK and my family have supported me as I follow my dreams to become a midwife.”

Her mum Kate added: “We always believed that deafness should not overshadow Beatrice’s character or preclude her from any opportunity in life. Thanks to AVUK it truly hasn’t.”