Gwen Carr - director - UK services at The National Deaf Childrens Society

Question: You start work as the new Director of UK Services on May 1. What was your background before taking this position?

Gwen Carr: Mainly deaf education. I trained as a teacher for the deaf - I won't tell you how many years ago! I taught all ages of deaf children and all levels of hearing impairment in main stream, special schools and units.

Question: On average how many babies are born deaf?

Gwen Carr: About one in 840, but it depends on local birth rates.

Question: What is the next step for them?

Gwen Carr: Well it varies at the moment on the age of the diagnosis. New born hearing screening is rolling out across the UK at the moment. 23 pilot schemes are all up and running and 16 more sites are coming on stream as we speak.

So at the moment if you are fortunate to be in an area which is in one of those sites, babies are identified within days or weeks of birth and hopefully support services will kick in from that time.

If however you are located where this is not established, it is a very variable outlook. We know from research that the earlier children are diagnosed the better for their long term outlook.

Unfortunately, it is still a variable experience for families with deaf children. We hope that this will get better and better and more and more fair.

Question: Does the NHS give families enough information?

Gwen Carr: Well actually I have to say that The National Deaf Children's Society leads on the information strand to families. We are responsible for producing the leaflets which are distributed on behalf of the NHS.

So I would say that the amount of information which has been reaching mothers-to-be has been good and of high quality.

I think where the screen is being implemented now, it is being put together with a lot of preparation and with parents fully aware of what is going to happen. Responses we have had so far are very, very positive.

Question: What more would you like the Department of Health to do?

Gwen Carr: I would like the secretary of state for health to appreciate the level of service development that is required from existing services in order to pick up these babies and give them full support.

I think the screening is absolutely wonderful and it's a really great opportunity to raise long term standards for deaf children, but, at present, it is crucial that once babies have been identified and assessed, services are able to respond appropriately to their needs.

I think that existing audiology services in particular and other health services such as speech therapy are in need of further development to provide the resources required to respond quickly and as comprehensively as we would like.

Question: Has the government placed enough importance to this area?

Gwen Carr: I think it would be fair to say that young disabled children have been a focus of development in recent years. But I suppose if you're working in the field we are working in, you would always like a greater focus.

The bottom line is that getting it right early on means longer term better outcomes for everybody. Families gain more confidence and skills and a successful outcome comes from empowered, confident families.

What more should be done to improve the education of deaf children?

Gwen Carr: Well there is a variety of choice for parents but not all of them have access. The NDCS takes the view that all parents should receive good, impartial and unbiased advice about what we refer to as "informed choice".

So they should be able to choose the communication methodology for their child and their own philosophy of education support.

And I think it would be fair to say across the country that this is quite variable. Some families in certain areas don't actually have the choice on how their child will be educated.

In many cases it can be punitive upon a local education authority to send a deaf child to a specialist school because of the funding issue.

So what I would like to see is true open choice without it being punitive on other children. If one child attends a specialist school, other children should not lose out in terms of funds. If a family has to fight their local LEA - it's obvious that this isn't ideal.

Question: What are your priorities going to be for the first year?

Gwen Carr: My major aim will be to look at follow-up services from the point of diagnosis and to try and ensure that these are of a high enough quality to respond to the needs of very early identified deaf children and their families.

We know from very robust research in America that if you get it right very early on you are actually changing life chances of children and so the real challenge is to get children to have age appropriate language.

In previous years the challenge of deafness has always been a huge one because children have started at the normal school age with language levels far behind those of their hearing counterparts.

We know that the better the language levels, the better your learning opportunities are.

So if someone granted me a wish, it would be for every deaf child to start school with the same language levels as their hearing peers.