Letter from The National Deaf Children’s Society

Steve George
Clerk to the Committee
Assembly Parliamentary Service
Cardiff Bay,
Cardiff
CF99 1NA

30 October 2007

Dear Mr George,

Health & Social Care Workforce Planning

The National Deaf Children’s Society is committed to campaigning for a world without barriers for every deaf child & young person. A significant part of this is ensuring that their needs are properly identified, and then met by appropriately qualified professionals. Hence our particular interest in this inquiry.

We run weekends for the parents of deaf children to provide emotional, educational and social care support; have family officers who provide that same support on an on-going basis at home and run a wide range of events for children and young people. But we also support parents in accessing the professional help their deaf child needs and deserves, and its from that knowledge that this submission stems.

As an organisation we find there are very few raw statistics available in this area. Our first recommendation to the committee is that a formal audit of additional skill sets amongst existing staff should be conducted to firm our anecdotal evidence into a clearly enumerated and agreed deficit.

Social Workers

Social work has one of the highest vacancy and turnover rates of any profession in the UK.

Deaf children are more vulnerable to abuse than hearing children but as a rule the number of social workers trained to assess and support deaf children is very limited. This leaves deaf children requiring the services of social workers particularly vulnerable.

Alongside any proposals to increase the numbers, and perhaps as importantly the retention rate, of social workers needs to be a strategy to increase the number trained to assess and to support deaf children.

Mental Health Workers

The lack of resources for CAMHS has been well documented in recent years, most notably by the office of the Children’s Commissioner.

Deaf children are more vulnerable to mental health issues than their hearing counterparts, so the lack of staff in this area hits them two-fold - in the lack of CAMHS support at all and in the lack of staff with specialist communication and assessment training (for example, some common symptoms of poor mental health are similar to some behaviour patterns where there has been insufficient communication support. Without that specialist knowledge a mis-diagnosis is a risk, even setting aside the vital importance of communication).

Speech and Language Therapists

There is a shortage of employed Speech and Language Therapists, (SLT) particularly those with a specialism of deaf children. As an organisation we’ve had experience of supporting parents in getting SLT into a Statement, only to find that there is no-one to deliver it.

Foster Carers/Adoptive Parents

We have had experiences of children with known hearing impairments being placed with families with no previous direct experience of deaf issues, no deaf awareness training, no knowledge of signing or any other means of communicating with a deaf child.  Again, this inability to communicate between foster/adoptive parents and children doesn’t help the deaf child, nor the parent in providing support.  

Audiologists

Across the UK there is a shortage of audiologists with many staff due to retire in the next 5 years. This is, more than most of the specialisms discussed here, an issue that needs to be addressed at a UK level (both in terms of the employment market and the training) and with which the Assembly Government needs to actively engage.

Conclusion

It’s obviously not solely within the competence of the Assembly Government to take action to address all these issues.

Some problems may arise from payscales which are insufficient to attract sufficient candidates, particularly after lengthy (and in some cases expensive) training. Some may result from a lack of training places available across the UK. But in both cases, the Assembly Government could and should take the issue up at a UK or England & Wales level as appropriate.  

Some of these issues may not be down to a lack of trained staff (though from our experience the majority are) but from employers not employing such staff even where the need exists. So workforce planning needs to encompass the matching of appropriately trained staff; with numbers of employment places; with need.

As stated initially, from the perspective of NDCS, action that would be clearly within the competence of the Assembly Government and would make a very real and positive improvement to deaf children’s lives would be a comprehensive audit of need for specifically trained deaf professionals; followed by an action plan to close the gap and ensure that if a deaf child needs support from a particular professional to achieve their full potential, that support is available.

In the context of your terms of reference, our representation is simply that in workforce planning terms:

• there needs to be an element of drilling below the headline figures of numbers of particular professionals, to ensure that the full skillset is provided to the full range of each client group, some of whom may have additional needs, such as communications impairment. We don’t see the evidence on  the ground that this is a key element of workforce planning at present.
• That all specialists need to be considered in workforce planning, not simply the high incidence, high demand professionals such as GPs, nurses, dentists etc.   

NDCS would of course be happy to provide any further information or thoughts on the issues outlined in this submission.

Yours sincerely

Stephen Smith
Director, Wales