Family Sign Language

Over the next few months, NDCS Scotland will be working hard to make sure that the Scottish Government makes good on its promises to deaf children and their families. 

Thanks to pressure from NDCS during the election campaign, the Scottish National Party (SNP) made a manifesto commitment to take forward plans to support the provision of British Sign Language (BSL) lessons for parents of new born deaf children if re-elected.   The SNP won the election by a considerable majority - and it is now up to us to hold the Govenment to its word!

90% of deaf children are born to parents who have little or no experience of deafness. Currently if a parent of a deaf child wants to access a BSL class to develop communication with their baby at home, they have to pay for this out of their own pockets, and often struggle to find a class that takes place at a family friendly time.  

NDCS Scotland will be working to support the Scottish Government to find the most effective way of supporting parents of deaf children to access sign language which helps them communicate as a family.

Let us know what you think!

Your recent comments

BSL teachers to work with families

26 August 2011

Good point. It has been clear since at least 2002 - so almost a decade now - that progress around BSL issues in Scotland depends upon ensuring a supply of appropriate trainers. In 2002, the report "Creating Linguistic Access for Deaf and Deafblind People: A Strategy for Scotland" (http://www.ssc.education.ed.ac.uk/resources/deaf/sasli/intro.html) advised clearly of the need: "i. to provide training of trainers, including trainers of interpreters, lipspeakers and tutors of BSL; ii. to provide direct training of tutors of BSL, BSL/English interpreters {etc}". The BSL & Linguistic Access Group, which advises the Scottish Government on these issues, has been reinforcing that same message for YEARS - and NDCS is represented on that Working Group. So far, steps have been taken (via two successful courses, led by a Deaf director, Gary Quinn, at Heriot-Watt University) to ensure that trainers of BSL teachers are available in Scotland. NDCS knows therefore that it needs to be lobbying for the next step to be taken: frontline training to expand the pool of Scottish BSL teachers who can work in families, schools, colleges and wherever they are needed to increase BSL skills country-wide.

Professor Graham Turner - Scotland

Great News

24 August 2011

sounds fantastic :-) however my only concern is that there seems to be a real shortage of tutors who are able to teach children and parents, I guess this may take a wee while before we see it in practice if there are training issues to solve first. Good luck :-)

Julie Davidson

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