Award Winning Deaf Teacher An Inspiration For Deaf and Hearing Children Alike

Last year was a very good year for Alysha Allen who teaches pupils at Brimsdown Primary School in Enfield. She won a pretigious award and was recognised as an outstanding teacher as well as an influential figure in the deaf community.

Alysha is profoundly deaf and communicates using British Sign Language and lip reading. She is one of the very few deaf teachers working in a primary mainstream school, teaching hearing and deaf children side by side.

At the end of 2019 she was presented with a Special Contribution Award from Maths Hub London North East, a programme involving around 600 schools focusing on improvement in mathematics. In November, she was one of eight finalists in the New Teacher of the Year category of the TES Schools Awards 2020.

Coping with deafness in childhood

Alysha was slow to walk and talk but she was two and a half before her family realised that she was deaf. A doctor diagnosed problems with ear balance and deafness and warned that she was unlikely to talk, so she should learn to sign instead. 

She started in a mainstream nursery setting but was labelled as disruptive because the teachers had no idea how to engage her interest or to cope with her behaviour. Her mother found a speech and language therapist who worked with her on her speech and an Australian teacher of the deaf took an interest in her and started to work with her through music and rhymes.

Specialist teaching

The big breakthrough came when she was nine and started at Mary Hare, a specialist boarding school for deaf children, which focuses on lipreading and oral communication. ‘The classes were small with maybe six or eight students sitting in a horseshoe shape so we could all see one another’s faces,’ said Alysha. ‘It was an amazing education.’

She did A-levels in psychology, history, performing arts and English literature. When she left, she went to London Metropolitan University to study Events Management. ‘I had visions of being a nightclub owner,’ she said. However, the university could not provide her with a notetaker: ‘They seemed to think that I could hear because I could talk.’ She fell further and further behind, lost motivation and dropped out.

First taste of teaching

Not one to sit around doing nothing, Alysha worked with adults with learning difficulties and moved on to volunteer a day a week at Riverside, a local special needs school, where she became a teaching assistant.

‘I really loved it,’ she said, ‘especially when I covered for an absent teacher. The trouble was I found it hard to go back to being a TA, because I could see different ways of doing things, especially for the children who were not really motivated.’

The deputy suggested that Alysha should think about teaching as a career. She liked the idea but opted for a sabbatical before making a decision. She and a group of friends went travelling for several months and spent a lot of time on beaches planning the future but they did visit a school in Thailand which had different methods for teaching deaf children.

When she returned to Enfield, she went back to Riverside for teacher training because they would let her work and study at the same time. Alysha liked the idea of working with teenagers but opted for primary because she did not have one strong specialist subject and had realised that she had a particular knack of working with children who found it hard to learn because of their global delay in development, autism, motor /sensory loss and simialr conditions.

Choosing which sector

Her training posed a few problems especially when she discovered that she would have to do one teaching practice in secondary mainstream. She was daunted by the prospect of standing up in front of 30 hearing children but adamant that she did not want an interpreter in the classroom. In the end, Alysha had a placement in a supportive school which had a Deaf Unit and where the Communication Support Workers who were in several of her classes could smooth her path if necessary.

‘I had a lot more fun than I thought I would and planned to try it for a year,’ said Alysha. She did her second placement at Brimsdown Primary School in Enfield, a mainstream school where children were in classes with hearing children but had the support of an on-site Deaf Unit that provided extra English lessons and support. After qualifying, she got a job there.

A signing school

Brimsdown recently celebrated 10 years as an accredited hearing impairment resource base by Signature, the leading awarding body for deaf communications qualifications in the UK.

The school has a policy that every child will sign. They have one class a week with a deaf teacher and all the children learn BSL as their modern foreign language.

‘It makes sense,’ said Alysha. ‘We already have over 40 different languages spoken in the school. We have a Deaf Unit and want children to develop the skills and confidence to use the language, not just in class but in the playground as well.  Signing also helps EAL children to improve their understanding of English because it is so visual.’

Her first class was year 3. She spent a lot of time at the beginning explaining that they needed to be quieter than they would be in other classes. They were used to having deaf instructors for MFL each week and having deaf support workers in class and they had grown up with the idea of deafness and signing.

The parents were a different matter. They were concerned whether she would be able to communicate with their child and whether it would affect academic progress. Senior management spent time reassuring them that Alysha was suitably qualified. Some of the parents who were the most vociferous in the early days became much friendlier as the year progressed.  

She’s a winner!

In 2019, Alysha was nominated for the Special Contribution Award from Maths Hub London North East by Brimsdown’s Acting Headteacher Eleanor Painter. She said: ‘Despite being profoundly deaf, Alysha teaches and engages an entire class of hearing children which is a remarkable achievement. The children absolutely love learning sign language and not only does this help to create a really inclusive environment at the school, research has shown that it can help with language and speech development too.’

In November 2020, Alysha celebrated winning the TES New Teacher of the Year Award by watching the announcement on Zoom and sharing a bottle of champagne with her mum and other members of the family. 

The judges said: ‘Teaching and engaging an entire class of primary pupils is already an achievement for a new teacher. However, having them all progress to above average performance in maths while profoundly deaf, and using a combination of sign language and lip reading to interact with a class of hearing children, is the mark of an exceptional talent.’

Learning in lockdown

When schools closed because of Covid-19 the school had to move to online teaching which provided new challenges for Alysha. She conducted live lessons on Google Classroom using subtitles and sign language to communicate with her class.

Fortunately, the school decided that all classes would move up with their class teacher from last year, so she knew all her pupils really well.  Nevertheless, she has had some difficulties as the technology limits the interaction. When it is in presentation mode Alysha can’t see all the children but has a little window where she can see the Communication Support Worker who can let her know if there are any problems.

There have been advantages though: ‘The children are actually signing so much more. I am so proud of them!’ she said. ‘However, they are quite slow in the chat boxes. It takes them forever to find the punctuation on the keyboard!’

The dilemma – special v mainstream

Alysha is conscious that as a deaf person teaching hearing children, she is a rarity. She has overcome obstacles, but these would discourage a less determined person. Some of the conditions of teacher training leaves deaf teachers at a significant disadvantage compared to their hearing counterparts.

She would like to see more specialist provision for deaf learners too. Alysha fears that many deaf children who go into mainstream don’t get a fair deal because of budget cuts. She would also like to see more special schools as well as school like Brimsdown Primary School to meet a wider range of needs: ‘I loved Mary Hare and I know I would not be the person that I am today or have had so many opportunities without my education there. But it was a bubble and there wasn’t enough integration into the world outside. It was amazing for education but not so good for the social and community side. Mainstream is better for that.’

The future

She has no plans to move on at the moment but is setting her sights on becoming a head of year in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, she is enjoying teaching the pupils. ‘My year 4 class are just wonderful. When I first started working with them, I made them develop their own sign to represent their name, something they felt was typical of them.  Now they all have their spoken name and their sign name.’

Alysha’s sign is a good visual representation of her image and personality – it shows her putting on her lipstick. 

As Samantha Twiselton, the lead judge for her category of the TES Award, said: ‘The winner is a fantastic role model for children and teachers everywhere’

Sal McKeown is an author and freelance writer on Digital Learning and Special Needs