Each year we look forward to celebrating Cued Speech at our Family Cue Days. We like to enable families and professionals to relax and learn in beautiful surroundings, with comfortable on-site accommodation, good food and fun things to do for everyone. It’s a chance to meet up and see first-hand the successes of families and professionals who have been using Cued Speech for many years.

This summer we are going to be in both Hertfordshire and Wales:

• 17 August 2019, Academy St Albans, St Albans, Hertfordshire. Click here for a PDF of this flyer.

• 31 August 2019, FCS Margam Park Discovery Centre, Port Talbot, Wales. Click here for a PDF of this flyer.

Come along and join us to learn or improve your cueing skills. Whether you’re starting from scratch or emerging as a Cued Speech user, you can share the fun with other families with deaf children, and professionals learning this amazing and life-changing communication method. We like to create an environment full of visual language, so users of spoken English and British Sign Language can feel welcome and included. Everyone is nurtured and supported to cue with confidence.

Contact Cued Speech UK to book onto one of our Family Cue Days, by sending an email to [email protected] or you can call us on 01803 712553.

To find out how you can learn Cued Speech, visit our website here.

Why not give a donation to Cued Speech UK by using our Support Us website page.

Show what you have to say, with Cued Speech UK!

Learning to use Cued Speech is so much fun and can be so life-changing for families with deaf children. Helen Campbell, who works as a medical Sign Language interpreter, decided to learn to use Cued Speech when she found out how it supports deaf people’s access to spoken English.

Helen said “I think that Cued Speech is an amazing tool to enable deaf people to access all the information that hearing people can and I think that it’s just so much easier for families to learn. All deaf people should be raised with both British Sign Language (BSL) and English. But it’s so difficult for parents to learn BSL initially; there’s not enough access to it and BSL tutors are so rare. However, parents can learn Cued Speech over a weekend and start revealing language to their deaf children almost immediately. We live in England and everything is done in English, so deaf people should have full visual access to both BSL and English. Cued Speech can allow deaf people to become literate, and with these fully developed reading and writing skills they can communicate effectively in a world that relies so much on written communication.”

Helen passed her level 1 Cued Speech at our base; The Boatshed in Totnes and she’s looking forward to telling everyone about her success. As an accomplished BSL/English interpreter and expert in visual language for deaf people, Helen can now add Cued Speech to her extensive professional skills and she also has the opportunity of training towards the level 2 qualification.

Becoming qualified in Cued Speech use can lead to career choices; teaching families and deafness professionals how to cue as a ‘CueTutor’ or perhaps even becoming a ‘transliterator’.  To transliterate means to represent a spoken language like English, in a different mode. This means transliterators represent English visually, through cueing it, rather than orally through speaking it. This is different from ‘interpreting’ which is representing a first language in a second separate language. Helen may one day be able to interpret for some clients in BSL and transliterate for others with Cued Speech.

Families often use a bilingual approach at home, by choosing to use both BSL and Cued Speech with their deaf children. This is the most complete bilingualism, that aims to give deaf children native-level understanding and use of both languages; spoken English and signed BSL. As the popularity of Cued Speech grows in the UK, perhaps Helen can look forward to her skills being very much in demand.

To find out how you can learn Cued Speech, visit our website here.

If you have a deaf child or want to learn more about Cued Speech, you can contact Cued Speech UK by using our contact page, you can also send an email to [email protected] or you can call us on 01803 712553.

Cued Speech UK would love to see what you have to say!

Why not give a donation to Cued Speech UK by using our Support Us website page.

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”
Maya Angelou

Mary Elsie Daisey is a courageous mother. As the first mother to use Cued Speech with her deaf child, she is a pioneer of a system invented by Dr. R Orin Cornett in 1966. In order to test its efficacy, Cornett persuaded her to try his brand new invention; a manual system to support speech perception and language acquisition. Mary must have been full of doubts about taking on such a challenge. She must have worried about the outcomes of the trial and whether it would be a successful method for her child. But, like all true pioneers, she possessed the courage, vision, persistence and passion to take those first steps into the darkness, to be able to shed light on new possibilities and discover a new way for deaf children to acquire language and thrive.

Mary wrote of that first encounter, “I did not know what a lasting effect he (Dr. R Orin Cornett) would have on my life when we first met him back in September 1966. Our 2-year-old daughter, Leah, had just been diagnosed profoundly deaf and we knew absolutely nothing about deafness. Dr. Cornett’s assistant, Barbara Caldwell, began our education by explaining the current oral and manual options and then the new communication system her boss had just developed. It was called Cued Speech and he was anxious to have a family try it. When we met with Dr. Cornett, he convincingly described his system but cautioned that it had never been tried with a deaf child and that we should go home and think about it. He said we must realize that his enthusiasm was because Cued Speech was “his baby” – he believed it would work but he did not know that it would. In other words, he needed a guinea pig family to prove it would work — that the use of Cued Speech would provide for a deaf baby the natural language development, communication skills, and reading ability to function comfortably and optimally in the wide world around us.

We immediately decided to try Dr. Cornett’s new system and thus acquired the honor of being the first family to benefit from the use of Cued Speech. And we discovered in just one month that it was working! We had a remarkable communication system that allowed our family of five children to communicate with each other and their parents, and our deaf child was learning language and becoming a truly participating member of that family. Cued speech worked!”

Mary Elsie Daisey is co-author (with Dr. R Orin Cornett) of The Cued Speech Resource Book for Parents.

You can see Mary talking in this video about her success with Cued Speech when she was interviewed by William Friday on North Carolina People in 1985.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ-Kc7qum1s

If you have a deaf child or want to learn more about Cued Speech, you can contact Cued Speech UK by using our contact page, you can also send an email to [email protected] or you can call us on 01803 712553.

Cued Speech UK would love to see what you have to say!

Why not give a donation to Cued Speech UK by using our Support Us page on our website.

Recently Cued Speech UK went and spoke with students from the University of Edinburgh, where they are training to be teachers of the deaf. It was a great opportunity to discuss the latest figures from the NDCS, which highlight how deaf children are struggling in their school years, and how, following the publication of these figures, educators and underfunded councils appear to have been given the accountability for this under achievement of deaf children in schools.

An article “Deaf children fall behind at school, says charity” by the BBC’s family and education reporter Katherine Sellgren highlights these recent statistics from the NDCS and focuses on the idea that education is struggling to meet the needs of deaf children. The news item also implies how more government funding will by some means improve the situation.

“Deaf children in England are falling behind their classmates from primary school through to GCSE, analysis by the National Deaf Children’s Society shows.

“Only 30.6% achieve a GCSE strong pass – Grade 5 or above – in both English and maths, compared with 48.3% of children with no special educational needs.

“And 57% fail to reach expected levels in reading, writing and maths in Sats tests at the end of primary, compared with 26% of children with no SEN.

“The NCDS urges more government funding.”

In the article Chief executive of the NDCS, Susan Daniels, said: “These figures show the true depth of the crisis engulfing deaf education in this country.

“Meanwhile, the government is starving local councils of funding, meaning their support is cut back and their specialist teachers are being laid off.

“The government needs to address the gap in results urgently and begin to adequately fund the support deaf children need.

“It promised every child in this country a world class education, but until deaf and hearing children progress and achieve at the same level, it is failing to deliver and that is utterly unacceptable.”

However, we know that overall early years deaf children, when they arrive at school, are just not ready. They arrive at school unprepared and without sufficient language to take advantage of their education. It’s only at school that children’s language ability is benchmarked, and their insufficiencies are made apparent.

The student teachers at the University of Edinburgh were demonstrating how willing they were to experiment and adapt to new methods to improve the outcomes for their deaf pupils. But perhaps we are asking too much, to expect these teachers to get their deaf pupils to catch up with language that was never there in the first place.

Deaf children, like all children, need full exposure to complete language as babies well before their school years. Only, for deaf children this language needs to be visual.

Cued Speech UK provides parents with free support and training in Cued Speech, to allow them to provide visual language to their deaf children. Parents are key. They want the very best outcomes for their deaf children and language is the priority. Cued Speech allows deaf children to see what their parents are saying, so that they can arrive at school pre-equipped with all the language they need to become literate.

Cued Speech provides a solution for parents, to allow them to support the work of schools and improve the outcomes and outlook for all deaf children, particularly as cued speech, based on a phonemic system, offers a direct link to literacy.

If you have a deaf child or want to learn more about Cued Speech, you can contact Cued Speech UK by using our contact page, you can also send an email to [email protected] or you can call us on 01803 712553.

Cued Speech UK would love to see what you have to say!

Why not give a donation to Cued Speech UK by using our Support Us page on our website.

Friends, families and supporters gathered at the new Cued Speech UK headquarters this week to celebrate our move to spacious new offices.

Amongst the laughs and smiles, it was a great opportunity to thank everyone who has helped our charity’s recent growth. We now have the base we need to support delivery of our new services and our recent expansion of Cued Speech into new areas.

Aptly named, ‘The Boatshed’ is a strikingly contemporary building ‘moored’ on the banks of the River Dart in the charming market town of Totnes in Devon; a modern building that now reflects our charity’s ambitions. Such a peaceful location in Devon provides the perfect setting for our meetings, training workshops and service innovations. Visiting families with deaf children and hearing professionals will find it easy to get to us now either by road or rail and our modernised systems will enable us to enhance our communications nationwide.

Our move to a new base is an opportunity for us to reaffirm our commitment to families with deaf children, as the only charity based in the UK providing family support, training and information to help make speech visible with Cued Speech; the foundation for all other communication interventions for deaf babies, children and adults. Strengthened by new appointments, our staff are excited and even more determined to ensure that families with deaf children are fully informed and have an opportunity to immerse their child in visible language from birth.

Executive director Henrietta Ireland said “I’m really excited to be part of such a vibrant organisation and I’m blessed to have such a fantastic team”

We want to thank everyone who helped celebrate with us and we are looking forward to meeting up again, with even more people, at our next event!

You can make donations to Cued Speech UK by using our Support Us page on our website

If you have a deaf child or want to learn more about Cued Speech, you can contact Cued Speech UK by using our contact page, you can send an email to [email protected] or you can call us on 01803 712553.

Cued Speech UK would love to see what you have to say!

Cued Speech UK is moving to new offices in Totnes, Devon.

Gone are the sloping floors and draughty rooms in the old Forces Tavern at Blackawton; The building has served us well as our headquarters since March in 2016, nearly three years, in the heart of the beautiful South Hams of Devon, allowing us to prepare for bigger and better things. It has not been the first time the old tavern has served as a place to make big plans; rumour has it, that it provided a venue for Churchill and his advisors, to plan rehearsals on Devon’s Slapton Sands for the D-Day landings into occupied Europe, during world war II. However, these days, it has often been difficult for our staff and visitors to travel to such a remote location, which can only really be reached by car. We have all become expert rally divers, well-practiced on country lanes and able to reach those families in need of Cued Speech, whatever the weather! Although we have now outgrown our old location, we shall all look back fondly on a building that has supported our revitalisation into a future-facing charity with exciting plans for the years ahead.

Our new home, Totnes has an international reputation for its lively and diverse community and relaxed atmosphere; a charming market town that sits in the breathtakingly beautiful countryside of South Devon on the banks of the River Dart. Our new riverside offices at The Boatshed provide inspiring views over the river and a peaceful location for our meetings, training workshops and service innovations. Visiting families with deaf children and hearing professionals will find it much easier to get to us now by road or rail and we are updating our office communications. Having been at the old Forces Tavern, our new offices will place us firmly into the 21 Century, with plenty of space to allow for our recent growth and to give us the platform we need to support delivery of our new services and our expansion of Cued Speech into new areas.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us with our move and enabled us to improve our office surroundings. So, from now on ‘see what Cued Speech UK is saying’ at The Boatshed!

Cued Speech UK, The Boatshed, Steamer Quay, Totnes, Devon TQ9 5AL

You can make donations to Cued Speech UK by using our Support Us page on our website

If you have a deaf child or want to learn more about Cued Speech, you can contact Cued Speech UK by using our contact page or you can send an email to [email protected]. Cued Speech UK would love to see what you have to say!