Our Latest Project: Improving educational and social outcomes for deaf children of Roma families in the UK

Researchers in the School of Education at University of Leeds has launched a project to investigate the education needs of deaf children of Roma families.

This one year project is funded by the ESRC Impact Acceleration Award.

The aim of this work is to identify the learning, development and social needs of deaf children of Roma families and plan appropriate multi-professional intervention and support.

One of the aims of this project was to collect demographic information across four deaf education Local Authority services documenting the language and ethnicity information about the caseload and the wider educational context.

The aim of this is to grow our national knowledge of the language diversity and plurality of deaf children and the educational settings in which they are placed.

To do this we have used a combination of Government Census, CRIDE and case load data and, through working in collaboration with heads of service and teachers, we have developed a methodology and some initial demographic profiles.

This language planning guidance is an on-line tool that has been developed for practitioners by practitioners in deaf education. The planning, writing and research for this resource has been led by University of Leeds and the Sign Bilingual Consortium.

Contributions have been made by teachers of the deaf, speech and language therapists, deaf professionals and service managers and in the North and South East regions.

The resource was commissioned by the National Sensory Impairment Partnership (NatSIP) as part of their contract awarded by the DfE in April 2013. The work has been carried out within the BSL coalition work stream as part of their remit to develop specialist skills for BSL and sign support.