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 Cllr Adrian Oliver |
Positive signs for deaf school, but we have to secure its future
Plans to close the award-winning Frank Barnes School could be scrapped if we show we truly care about special needs education, writes Councillor Adrian Oliver
YOU would have thought that a local authority with an award-winning school for deaf children aged two to 11 years would proudly introduce parents of deaf infants to the school. The parents would then be able to look round the school, speak to staff and other parents directly, learning first hand about the benefits of the education and other services it provides before making a well-informed choice about which school is the most suitable for their child or children. Well, I was shocked to find out recently that this is not the case here in Camden.
We do have the award-winning school – Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children, in Swiss Cottage, was built by the Inner London Education Authority for deaf children in Camden and Islington and opened in 1978.
It was designed as a total communication school for teaching in sign-supported English, but evolved to teach the national curriculum in British Sign Language (BSL) and to pupils from across London. The teaching methods it researched and developed have marked it out as a centre of excellence, it has won awards, Beacon status and national and international renown.
Support and classes in BSL are also available to parents and families with deaf children and professionals in the field of deaf education come here to learn about its methods.
Sadly, the drive for cochlear implants and integration with hearing children has resulted in Camden Council only directing the parents of children who are deaf and have additional special needs towards the school. For the past eight years, parents with deaf children without additional special needs have been encouraged to send their children further afield and, in some cases, they are never even told of the existence of Frank Barnes School, despite it being in Camden.
However, research has shown that such deaf children often do better in a BSL environment like that on offer at Frank Barnes School, where there are also many deaf role models among the staff. Camden Council must change this policy and ensure all parents of young deaf children can make an informed choice and benefit from the services Frank Barnes School provides if they wish to.
If that wasn’t bad enough, in July of last year the council announced that it intended to grab the land Frank Barnes School is on for the site of the new secondary school and also indicated that parents of deaf children were choosing to send their children elsewhere.
Yet Camden Council and Frank Barnes School started discussions and work on possible options for the development of the school in 1999 and in September 2004 the council concluded that the school was an excellent school and should continue to develop as a regional centre of excellence on its current site. But development plans stalled because of the prospect of the Building Schools for the Future programme.
In October, members of the executive said that they wanted Frank Barnes School to thrive and sufficient funds would be found to enable it to do so, but the following month the executive decided to consult on the future of the school in January, with a preference for closing and transferring pupils to Blanche Nevile School in Haringey or, failing that, to relocate the school on the site of the Torriano schools.
I initiated a call-in of that decision for further scrutiny, with the support of my Green and Labour colleagues, for several reasons. No feasibility study had been done on the preferred option and the feasibility of the latter option needed reworking; the governors of the Torriano schools opposed the move there because of the loss of playground space; and the timing was being driven by the Building Schools for the Future programme, not what was best for Frank Barnes School, as certain options for the school were being ruled out because they could not be delivered in the timescale for building the new secondary school. Then there is the ethics of it. The land is Camden’s because it is providing a regional special needs education service. To see it as cheap land for a mainstream school and not fund a replacement school is unacceptable.
This was the first successful call-in under the new scrutiny arrangements and this administration. The executive changed its earlier decision, delaying the consultation a little, and the choice of a preference, so that more feasibility work could be undertaken, including a reappraisal of the possibility of co-locating the school on the site of Primrose Hill School, which both schools have indicated is likely to be acceptable.
The consultation is expected to start in February and it is important that those of us who care about special needs education participate in the consultation. It is also important that the executive look again at the Building Schools for the Future programme with a view to delivering secondary school education in BSL for deaf children in Camden and that the council acknowledges its responsibility to lead the further development of Frank Barnes into a regional centre of excellence. There is an opportunity here to ensure that future deaf children of all ages in Camden, and across London, get the best possible education. It must be grasped.
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