STA service for deaf students
Our team provides support for children and young people who are deaf from birth to 25 years. Our team works in partnership with families and professionals at home, early years settings, schools and colleges to achieve high outcomes for deaf children and young people.
The National Deaf Children's Society provides up to date information about deafness.
Our criteria
We support:
a child or young person aged from 0 to 25 years with diagnosed deafness.
The child or young persons’ deafness can be:
- unilateral or bilateral
- mild, moderate, severe or profound
- conductive, sensorineural or mixed
- aided or unaided
Policy for referral to the Specialist Teacher Advisors (STA) Team - Hearing and Vision
Referrals
We can only accept referrals which are accompanied by an NHS diagnosis from the audiology department.
- Babies are referred to audiology after their Newborn Hearing Screening test if there was no clear response. If your child is referred to us following their Newborn Hearing Screening, we will contact you within 48 hours of the referral being made.
If you are worried about your child’s hearing talk to your health visitor or GP to arrange a referral to audiology.
- If a referral is made by the GP or Health visitor to the NHS audiology department, an appointment will be arranged with you for an audiologist will assess your child's hearing. Parents and guardians will be asked to sign a consent form at this appointment. The consent form allows the sharing of medical information.
- If your child is found to have any degree of deafness ranging from mild, moderate, severe to profound then a referral into our service will be arranged by the audiology service.
- If your child is referred to our service and meets our criteria, we aim to contact you within two weeks.
- We will write to you to request your consent to us seeing your child and to share medical information if this was not given during the audiology appointment.
- If we don't receive consent from you we will not able to offer support.
Next steps
When your child or young person is seen by us their needs are met through regular monitoring visits or through weekly taught sessions in the home, pre-school, school or college. A coaching model of support is provided to all families of babies and pre-school deaf children within criteria.