My name is Emma and I'm a Deaf Inclusion worker
I work with a profoundly deaf eleven year old boy
in his mainstream school
I support him 3 days a week using BSL and Cued Speech
When I started a year ago he had limited communication and he was pre-literate
Thanks to Cued Speech he now has a reading age of five and a half to six years
and his spelling age has increased by seventeen months
He can sound out words
and he uses a dictionary with IPA
to find out how to say new words
that's a fantastic independent skill
His speech has improved because he can now see the sounds he needs to make
so he can now communicate with the people around him
He is happy, confident and he loves learning
He is acheiving and he knows it
In September he is going to Secondary School
I'm going with him
and we have every reason to believe
that he will keep up with his peers, his hearing peers
in subjects like Science, Technology and Humanities
while maintaining this accelerated rate of progress in literacy
