The work of the Cued Speech Association UK

Why we exist


The Cued Speech Association UK is working to eliminate the tragedy of many deaf children being virtually excluded from family life because they can’t communicate and leaving school with a reading age of 9.

Cued Speech completely clarifies the lip-patterns of normal speech so that deaf children can learn and understand English. It can be learnt in only 20 hours. It is no exaggeration to say that its use can totally transform the lives of deaf babies and children and their families. It can also help deaf and deafened adults to access and use English. It can be used:

  • To support the use of hearing aids or cochlear implants
  • Bilingually with British Sign Language


Our staff and volunteers work to ensure that as many deaf children and adults as possible benefit from it.

Our History


Cued Speech was created by Dr R Orin Cornett in America in 1966. The first teacher to use it in the UK was June Dixon-Millar, who founded the National Centre for Cued Speech in 1976 as part of KIDS, the charity for children with a disability.

We became an independent registered charity in 1980 and we are a Company Limited by Guarantee. Originally based in Canterbury with an office and training centre, we relocated to Devon in 1999 on the appointment of the current Executive Director.

We changed our name to the Cued Speech Association UK in 2000 to reflect the change from having an on-site training centre to hiring low cost UK-wide venues for our training courses, thus reducing expenditure and increasing flexibility.

Our Work

The principal activity of the charity is to: provide information about and training in Cued Speech throughout the UK with the aim of improving the communication and literacy skills of deaf and hearing-impaired children and adults by giving full access to spoken language through vision.

No other charity does similar work

We are:

  • the only providers of information about Cued Speech in the UK
  • the only providers of Cued Speech training nationally
  • the only body which represents the needs of Cued Speech users to government bodies and other organisations
  • funded by grants from charitable trusts, companies and individuals. We receive no government funding and, currently, no lottery funding.


The two core functions of our charity, provision of information and training, are carried out on a developmental basis in two separate projects, with each (normally 3-year) project building upon the last to include new work identified by evaluation and feedback from our users.

Information

  • Information is vitally important because, without it, deaf children are not able to benefit from Cued Speech simply because their parents do not know about it. With a grant from the Big Lottery Fund, we carried out a 3-year National Awareness Campaign which ended in March 2008. Through this Campaign, we have been successful in raising basic awareness of Cued Speech throughout the UK, resulting in a significant increase in the number of people asking for further information and training. However, we are aware that many parents and professionals still do not know enough about Cued Speech to make an informed choice about its use.
  • Also, evaluation of our work has identified that there is still a widespread expectation of low achievement for deaf children. This is unjustifiable because international research demonstrates that deaf children brought up with Cued Speech achieve reading scores equivalent to hearing children. Literate deaf children can reach their academic potential, enjoy equal employment opportunities and freely use information technology. They can become productive members of the community.
  • As a result, in April 2008 we began a new 3-year project ‘Information Plus’ to enable us to continue to provide information about Cued Speech to people who need to use it, to provide additional support to users, and to disseminate research with the aim that low achievement is not allowed to turn into reality for more deaf children.

Training

  • Our Awareness Campaign has resulted in a steadily increasing demand for Cued Speech training courses and we are now receiving record numbers of requests for tuition. In 2007/8 we provided 184 training places on 28 courses, compared to 168 places on 22 courses the previous year, 105 on 15 courses in 2005/6 and 85 on 11 courses in the year before the campaign started.
  • It takes about 20 hours to learn the basics of Cued Speech, after which students should be able to cue any word in the English language and have an understanding of the theory and uses of Cued Speech. We aim to provide Cued Speech tuition when and where needed throughout the UK. We run courses in different formats, as detailed in our Learn to Cue section of the website, a week-long residential course every summer which includes a full social programme in the evenings. This course is extremely useful for parents to come together and give mutual support. It also means they can fully ‘immerse’ themselves in the Cued Speech world without worrying about running the home.
  • A significant recent development has been our work with an exceptional volunteer who has created a ‘learn to cue’ website for us, entirely free of charge (www.learntocue.co.uk). This is transforming the way we teach, enabling parents to learn at very little or no cost, to us or them. We have now produced an e-learning workbook to accompany the website.
  • A new training project is planned to begin in April 2009. This will develop and deliver an enhanced training programme, not only in the mechanics of the Cued Speech system, but with greatly improved post-training and e-learning support and additional resources to enable parents and professionals to help deaf children to gain greatest benefit from Cued Speech.

Working with other organisations


There are no other organisations in the UK that provide Cued Speech information and training courses, although organisations such as the National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) pass on information materials which we supply.

We are members of the UK Council on Deafness (UKCoD), the umbrella organisation for charities which promote the interests of deaf, deafened, deafblind and hard of hearing children and adults and we are an active committee member of their ‘Access to Communication in English’ campaign which aims to ensure that all those who need English language based communication support can easily find it, thus enabling them to access vital public services.

We liaise with many other organisations within the UK who have similar aims to our own, such as:

  • I CAN, the charity which works to support the development of children’s speech, language and communication skills
  • The Ear Foundation, the national charity supporting deaf children and young people with cochlear implants, their families and professionals who support them
  • National Deaf Children’s Society
  • British Association for Teachers of the Deaf
  • National Literacy Trust

in order to provide the best possible service and to share good practice and learning.