Our charity’s ‘Local Offer’ – for parents, individual professionals and L.A.s

If you have a deaf baby or child, or support one at school or nursery, we can help you communicate, and enable your child to learn English, by teaching you the simple system of Cued Speech (CS). CS combines eight hand shapes in four positions near the mouth, with normal speech, to make every sound a person is saying visually clear.

Our charity offers both information and training in Cued Speech.

Information

Our offer:

Information & advice (by phone or email) to families & professionals about using Cued Speech to give visual access to English for:

  1. deaf babies & deaf children who might benefit from a visual addition to hearing aids or implants or who haven’t yet been implanted.
  2. babies & deaf children who have no hearing and can’t be implanted, or whose family chooses not to implant (or not yet).
  3. deaf babies & deaf children who are primarily BSL users but who need access to English for education or literacy, or for communication with hearing people.
  4. deaf children in schools.

Cost: free

A wide range of printed and video information – download printed materials here or contact us for hard copies.

Cost: free

Our new information is certified under the Information Standard scheme (which was developed by the Department of Health to help the public identify trustworthy health and social care information) and is therefore officially ‘accurate, impartial, balanced, evidence-based, accessible and well-written’ and bears the Information Standard ‘kite mark’.
Information sessions for your parent or professional group – from 1 to 2 hours; by remote link or face to face (a training session can follow immediately).

Training

Our offer:

For families with deaf babies & deaf children, we arrange Cued Speech training so that they can communicate fully at home & can become effective language models for their children. This training can then be used to ensure their child reaches their full academic, personal and social goals, equal to those of their hearing peers. Our charity can usually offer free or reduced price tuition for parents when needed.

For professionals we arrange training in Cued Speech at nurseries and schools so that they can give deaf pupils full access to English and the curriculum. With an early start, CS can offer an educational advantage so that no deaf child forfeits their right to a full, comprehensive education. We also have additional resources to help teach phonics.

Training is flexible and, as a charity, we aim to keep the costs low. Training can be through Skype and/or face-to-face in homes and/or schools, supported by our free e-learning website. It only takes approximately 20 hours to understand the basics of Cued Speech (additional practice is needed to become fluent), and this training will enable you to make English fully visible.

What our clients say

Parents wrote:

Thank you so much for giving us the tools to support our son’s development.

My husband and I were trained by the CSAUK [Cued Speech Association UK] in 5 days. It seemed unbelievable and miraculous to us that we could cue to him nonsense words, silly sounds, nursery rhymes, read stories to him, chat to him, to say to him whatever we liked in English with every bit of syntax, grammar and vocabulary fully, simply and easily represented as though speaking normally. In fact, after only one week of CS training, we were capable of cueing perfectly and accurately every single one of the 30,000 or so words in our own vocabulary and any word or phrase ever published or spoken in the English language. For us, CS wasn’t a choice; it was a necessity if he was to have the chance to acquire a first full language and fully access our family life. It was the only way that we could avoid him becoming permanently language disabled later in life, the only way that we could enable him to gain the language necessary to support literacy and numeracy when he got to school.

A professional wrote:

The delivery was excellent, very friendly and a relaxed approach which encouraged our learning.