EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT OF DEAF CHILDREN

That this House notes the statement made by the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, the hon. Member for Gloucester, in March that only 32.9 per cent. of deaf pupils in England achieved five GCSEs at grades A* to C, compared with 57.1 per cent. of all children, an attainment gap of more than 24 percentage points; expresses its concern that many deaf children are under-achieving; further notes that, as deafness is not a learning disability, there is no reason why deaf children should not achieve at the same rate as their hearing peers of similar cognitive abilities; welcomes the decisions by the Department for Children, Schools and Families to begin publishing attainment data for children with special educational needs, broken down by type of special eduactional need and local authority area, and to initiate a research project on the wide variations between local authority areas in meeting special educational needs; regrets that the Government chose not to include the attainment of deaf and disabled children in the set of national public service agreement priority indicators or to make it a statutory performance indicator within the local government national indicator set for 2008 to 2011, thereby missing an opportunity to make tackling under-achievement by deaf children a central and local government priority; and calls on the Government to commit to closing the attainment gap between deaf children and their hearing peers and to reverse the decision not to include educational attainment of deaf children as part of the national public service agreement priority indicators for 2008 to 2011.