d/Deaf Education in Britain

There has been a lot in the news recently about how Special Educational Needs (SEN) schools are dramatically under-resourced and the devastating impact that is having on those children’s educational experiences and attainment. However, very rarely does a story about the provisions for specialised d/Deaf education break the news. I have been working in the sector for over six years and in that time I’ve been a notetaker (for deaf, small ‘d’ means not culturally Deaf, so likely they lipread, have cochlear implants, and don’t use British Sign Language (BSL)) and a communication support worker (CSW) (for Deaf, or ‘big D’ Deaf, meaning culturally Deaf, likely to be a BSL user and member of the Deaf community) in mainstream, state run further education colleges. I have also been a mental health support worker for Deaf adults, and a teaching assistant and 1:1 for a three year old with complex needs on top of deafness. In that time I have worked for a number of agencies and for Camden council, as well as for a Deaf charity.

The history of d/Deaf oppression via education becomes clear when you search the word ‘Oralism’. It’s beyond the scope of this article to elaborate on Oralism in any depth, but Deaf education has been blighted by the belief that suppressing sign language and teaching deaf children to lipread and speak is favourable. This has resulted in consistently poor literacy skills for d/Deaf individuals. I know of only one Deaf school in London (possibly in the whole of the UK?) that actually teaches in BSL, has Deaf teachers and a positive Deaf environment. The other d/Deaf schools offer something called ‘Total Communication’ (another ideology inevitably developed by hearing educators) which is a combination of Sign Supported English (SSE) and lipreading. Deaf educators and spaces that teach Deaf cultural, social and linguistic awareness are woefully underfunded and in terms of educational infrastructure, are constantly at risk of being underfunded into non-existence. Because the d/Deaf population is both large and small, approximately 150,000 BSL speakers in the UK, but up to four million d/Deaf or deafened, this group is underrepresented because it’s an ethically and ideologically complicated picture.

Technological advances in cochlear implantation have led to this being the first thing offered for parents of babies born deaf and the government do not (and have never) properly subsidised the teaching of British Sign Language. Deaf and hard of hearing children are cochlear implanted and sent to mainstream schools, and many Deaf adults speak about how isolated and difficult they found this to be. All this leads one to question, what does it mean to have a right to language and culture if you are deaf? I have found working in this sector massively interesting as both a peripatetic worker (meaning I travel from workplace to workplace) and contracted worker but found there is very little in the way of unionised organising for better working conditions. Deaf people have made gains recently in the development and launch of a BSL Curriculum, but in the absence of any extra government subsidy for the training of BSL teachers, it remains to be seen how this will be implemented into the education sector.

Working in the Sector

Everyone asks me, ‘oh interesting, how did you get into Deaf education?’ and the answer I usually offer is, the pay was OK. I was fed up working as a personal assistant to artists, and other piecemeal jobs, and the job my friend told me about, working as Deaf support, was paying roughly the same pay. I started at £18 per hour for notetaking work, got offered a free Level one British Sign Language course, offered by the agency (usually £500 or more) and I was able to go into different further education colleges and support d/Deaf students, with no training at all. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was doing extremely easy work, provided at minimum expense and maximum profit to the employer and not really at all tailored to the needs of the individual students, who often had complex needs on top of being d/Deaf. I loved it and found being in further education in state colleges gave me an insight into how the next generation are ‘coming up’. Spoiler alert, it’s a bit of a shit show.

My lack of training in this first job was really just a lack of effort on the part of my employer to ensure that I was able to adapt my work to meet the needs of the students. I think I did a written assessment and a touch typing test, but I am empathetic and care deeply about access to education, so I did my best and tried to build relationships with the students in order to adapt the notes as much as possible so that they would be useful to them. As a peripatetic worker it took a long time to connect with my co-workers in the same colleges, but I did work with the CSWs who supported the same students I did notetaking for. The best part about it was that I was a free agent, going to classes, all I had to do was text the agency administrator when I arrived. It’s no wonder I loved this work.

An average workday could look something like this: I turn up at the college in the morning and after the bureaucracy of actually getting access to the grounds (it took about two years of working regularly at one college before I got an ID card just to be allowed in, like any other staff), I would meet with a student outside their classroom and try to have a bit of a catchup. This would depend on how busy it was, and also on my own BSL skills, which took time to really develop. I would then be working alone, or also with a communication support worker. More often than not the student didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, and just wanted to participate and blend in as much as possible; but that’s easier said than done if they relied upon BSL to access the content of the lesson. They would be looking at the CSW all the time, rather than the teacher, and they need to have all group discussion mediated through the CSW. Students would rarely ask anything specific from their note takers, and there was never any time for feedback on how useful my notes actually were for them, so it required me to try and gain an understanding of their literacy level and try to adapt my notes accordingly. I could be note taking in Higher National Certification classes for Construction, for example, and trying to transcribe and make sense of very complex, information-dense lessons. Doing this work could be quite exhilarating, engaging such a range of topics and subjects, but transcription work for two hours is obviously quite exhausting.

I would work with one student for the morning, then have to rush in my lunch hour by bus for more lessons in the afternoon with a different student in another college. You would learn almost nothing about the student before you arrive to work with them, basically just their name. You would never be informed about the decisions being made on how work was being allocated and the situation of the students you were being assigned to work with. I’ve had employers claim that they cannot give me any details in advance about the individual I am travelling across London to support, in work, or at school, ‘because of GDPR’. Terrified administrators think I’m going to sell the data of these students for an extra buck on my train journey to support them. Absurdity reigns. At one agency I was working for, it was a bit of an open secret that if you’d been working there for a while and you were the favourite, then you would be given the students perceived to be ‘easier’ to work with. I remember overhearing these types of power plays when I would visit the office; ‘if the worker doesn’t do what I want her to do, I can make her life really difficult’. I would overhear that and think, oh no, what am I getting into? What is this all really about? The students themselves almost certainly had no say in the relationship that they were entering into with support workers and note takers, and there was little effort to tailor lessons to their individual circumstances. CSWs, although often in training toward full interpreter status, would be put into situations well beyond their competency to support a student, like trying to interpret English for Speakers of Other Language lessons who didn’t have British Sign Language as a first language either.

This work could be very alienating, on many levels. For many students, until I or another CSW arrived, they might spend the whole day not communicating to another person in their own language of BSL. We were the only people around they could really speak to, and build more extended relationships and recognition with. We were also kept very apart from the rest of the staff, and there was never any incentive to sit down collectively and think through curriculum or delivery of lessons in a way that might positively impact the student. Large colleges just didn’t seem very interested in building relationships with the d/Deaf community or engaging them in any way. In a rational system, all related staff would gather together at the start of a term to work through a plan together; but it was a system conducive only to optimisation for the agency, and never for creating a supportive educational environment. Many students don’t know what their rights of access are, so they would just have to put up with what was ultimately a very shoddy experience of education. What I’ve learnt through my work is that illiteracy is a huge issue for fully BSL speaking and non ‘oral’ speaking Deaf people, and there aren’t the resources or structures in place to support them completing meaningful education or getting them into work. This is when the job would feel really horrible, if you are compelled to reproduce these dynamics; the work was often care-adjacent in terms of support, and you just were never given the resources to actually support students.

Conditions and Organising in the Sector

It turns out that my work as a note-taker was to be a short-lived era. The colleges eventually noticed that these workers seemed too happy, and maybe too relaxed? Or more likely their budgets for supporting students with additional access needs were squeezed, and certainly they decided it was too expensive. The agency I worked for no longer provides this service and I suspect they lost the contract after the COVID-19 pandemic. I caught a fleeting moment of the good times in 2019 to 2021 when the small agency I worked for still had contracts with some colleges in the local area. The agency was based out of a state run primary and secondary residential d/Deaf school and I like to think that it might have provided some continuity of care for the students who were transitioning from secondary to further education. Now it seems that the market has been dominated by two mega HR companies, Reed and Ranstad, that purport to provide the same service for less money which was £12.00 per hour when I last checked in 2024. I cannot bring myself to do this work at this rate.

There are complex class dynamics at play across the sector, which shape the types of work being done, who is receiving support, and through which means. BSL is ultimately financially pretty inaccessible to learn: training BSL levels one to three (basic competency) can cost upwards of £4,000 in courses, so often it is wealthy, elderly or middle aged, and middle-class people who have taken up learning and working in BSL as something close to a hobby, alongside the increasingly small set of young workers who have chosen it as a vocation through one of the very few Deaf Studies degrees left in the country. I worked for a while in a BSL-only speaking school, with the aim to improve my own BSL, but the work I was given wasn’t particularly useful for developing my conversational skills, and many workers in the sector are not necessarily trained to the right level to actually support who they are assigned to work with.

There is no union of peripatetic workers, particularly the CSW workers who often work with no training in quasi-interpreter roles, with adults or young adults who need access to courses in higher education colleges, so knowledge about poor conditions is not widely known or discussed. Given it’s such a small sector, people are very wary of being critical of the structures of work, as everyone knows everyone and it’s easy to develop a bad reputation. When I was working at colleges, the active unions for teaching and admin staff had little interest, or ability, to collectively organise with myself or other CSWs, as we were agency staff not directly employed by the school. The gap between us and the rest of the staff that was felt in the classroom is thus often reproduced in the union structures themselves, and we are kept isolated.

Interpreters themselves have a much stronger union, and so are able to ensure much higher costs for their services. This is important, of course, but it can also produce a dynamic in which the cost of interpreters is prohibitively expensive for many within the Deaf community. While it’s important that the Interpreters have a very strong union, it can tend to produce a dynamic in which Deaf people can only access their services if they are backed and funded by institutions. We end up in absurd situations where large, institutionally-backed events have interpreters when there aren’t actually any Deaf people in the audience, as there has been no effort for outreach into the community to get them along to the event. A politically ‘right on’ organisation with lots of funding for accessibility will be able to pay for a load of interpreters for their event, but most Deaf people can’t rely on an interpreter for their medical appointments. Interpreters also don’t work within school or colleges, at least that I’ve ever seen, so note-takers and CSWs remain without any protections or ability to really support one another through something like a union.

Alongside the wider privitisation of this part of the sector it’s important to note, for example, the state of Access to Work as it currently stands. Access to Work is the governmental grant that funds individual Deaf workers’ access to interpreters at work, but the system has not been functional for a long while.¹ Unsurprisingly, the initial application forms are prohibitively long and complicated, and then once the grant has been accepted, receiving payment for interpreters can take months to process. I’ve heard of interpreters sometimes waiting for a whole year for payment. This means that interpreters might avoid taking on jobs with those people that rely on state support, so yet again, the non-wealthy Deaf get the worst deal. The government is currently in the process of reforming Access to Work and produced a green paper consultation in the summer of 2025. The DWP apparently want employers to take more responsibility for providing access to Deaf and disabled workers, under the Equality Act, but we all know that this will mean that employers just won’t employ disabled people if it comes at a cost to them (see the excellent resource, Deaf Access to Work website for more information on that). The structural problems which we see in education therefore continue to filter up into the workforce, as d/Deaf continue to face marginalisation and workers attempting to support them experience precarity.

The limits of the current system are obvious to anyone working within it, and my ideal arrangement for this system would be to cut-out the middlemen as much as possible; the workers themselves should run the service and be in direct communication with the service users, so the relationships can be more directly tailored toward their needs. There is only one existing co-operative as far as I know, called Signalise in Liverpool, who work primarily to offer services for customers in the NHS and councils, and their system ensures Deaf clients have far more control over which interpreters they get for intimate situations such as doctors appointments, which is much better than the agency system. But these projects are not widespread.

I’ve tried to organise with other workers over the last few years, but it’s proved very challenging - the nature of the work means that you might never meet anyone else working for an agency, and consciousness about working conditions and rights amongst workers in the sector is a barrier to organising. I have increasingly, instead, channeled my energies into facilitating spaces for individuals in the Deaf and BSL community to have political discussions, such as on the complexity of sign language in terms of developing a political education. I’ve been involved in a project, for example, to help expand signs used for radical concepts, where there is a need for more visually indicative signs; everything currently gets reduced to a small set of signs, like a raised fist for socialism, anarchism and communism (although capitalism is signed as a fat belly!). The work of the Deaf Anarchy project is really fantastic on these topics. I’ve found it more useful to support spaces and projects on these topics to meet like-minded people, with a hope that this political work might provide the foundation for a more coherent campaign of worker and union organising, and the means for building a strong network.

Anyone who studies BSL will learn about the ways in which Deaf education has suffered and what it could be with the right funding and consciousness raising. Workers in the sector need to stand together to demand better, specialised provision and improved access rights for d/Deaf children to choose the interventions and adaptations they deserve. Empathetic communication support workers need to organise together to refuse under-paid, under-informed positions of ethically dubious double exploitation. We should demand to be brought into conversation with the teachers and heads responsible for the child’s educational opportunities and given the right training to be able to support them as best we can.

In the Deaf school I worked in I think I reached the apex of exploitation within the sector. I took on a role where I was responsible for assisting with complex educational, communication and medical needs of a deaf three-year-old with autism. I received one day of training, in the current en vogue STEAM² and was basically left to get on with it. Although part of a team, I felt completely overwhelmed by the demands of this role and little to no pastoral support for navigating it. This is perhaps a more typical experience for any 1:1 Teaching Assistant that works within mainstream schooling with a child with SEN. If I were to go back to Deaf educational provision, I am keen to work as a freelance personal tutor, providing support for those in further education who have suffered at the hands of a mainstream environment and possibly been politicised in the process, opting to become ‘Full Deaf’, or stop speaking, unplug their cochlear implant and choosing to communicate only via BSL. How they will pay for my tutoring, or discover my services is, of course, another thing. I have a long term plan to organise with other workers to set up a co-op with Deaf and Hearing others who have worked in the sector and reject the exploitative agencies and depressing state school situation.

Please email [email protected] if you work in the sector, or simply want to support organising within it, to get in contact with the writer of this piece.