Roding Primary School has a specialist provision for children who have a severe to profound permanent hearing loss.  The provision has 35 places for children from Nursery to Year 6.  It is our aim to ensure that all these children become confident and independent with the skills they need to achieve their potential - that they are ‘Free to Achieve’.  We recognise that all deaf children are individuals with their own personality, strengths and needs, and we aim to teach them accordingly.  Our children are fully included in all aspects of school life at Roding and both hearing and deaf pupils benefit from working and playing together.

At Roding we have children with a range of hearing aids, cochlear implants and bone-anchored/bone conduction hearing aids (Bahas)) which are provided by the Health Service.  These are checked daily as soon as the children arrive at school and throughout the day as needed. Our children also have access to a radio aid system and all mainstream classes have a soundfield system. 

All staff working with our children are trained to do basic daily checks of equipment and we have a trained Audiology Technician who assists as needed to ensure our children have all the equipment they need and it is working.

We teach our children to be independent with their audiology equipment by being actively involved in their daily checks.  Children are also encouraged to develop their own strategies to give them access to their own learning e.g. seating in the best place to access lessons, giving the microphone to the speaker, telling the speaker that they cannot hear.  We help our children to have a good understanding of their audiogram and how their audiology equipment helps them.

We liaise with a number of audiology and cochlear implant centres, ensuring that they know how the children are progressing in school and also that we know any changes to their hearing levels and changes to their audiology equipment. Any faults with their equipment are reported immediately to parents and where appropriate to the correct audiology clinic.

We carry out Functional hearing tests with each child once a year.  More assessments may be carried out where a child is developing their listening skills or if there is a concern about the child’s hearing levels.  We use our own Early Listening Development Checklist, the McCormick Toy Test and the Manchester Picture and Word List Test as appropriate for each child’s academic and listening ability.  For some of our children these tests will be done to assess their ability to lip-read.  Our children are also tested daily using the ‘LING sound’ test.