758,000 Scots are deaf or have impaired hearing that's 1 in 7 of the population - 3000 of those are children. Donaldson's College specialises in preparing these young people for the challenges of life outside school. Classes at Donaldson's are often taught in British Sign Language or BSL as it is the first language of many deaf pupils.
"My motivation for making this documentary came from a bus ride in Edinburgh. I went and sat upstairs at the back of the bus in amongst 10 or so schoolchildren, I realised quite quickly that they were all deaf and were using BSL and texts to communicate with each other. At one point they all laughed noisily. I suspected that they were laughing at me. One of the boys almost rushed to where I was sitting and showed me a text and as best he could reassure me that they were not laughingat me but at a shared text.
"The difficulty of that brief communication made me realise that such incidents must occur every day for a deaf person and that the hearing world must be an isolating place for a deaf child. Just as I had felt in their deaf world."
George Cathro
Director
Life in a Hearing World - on air:
BBC2 Scotland 24th March 2008 21.00
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