Speaking Out Being Heard consultation with Self-Advocates

Blog by First year Speech and Language Therapy Student - Grace Emecz

As part of the Speaking Out Being Heard Signalong project, we ran a self-advocacy session with Bury People First, where we were practising some signing together, and they presented the work they have done to create and petition for the communication rights charter.

Self-advocacy is an important aspect of working with people with learning disabilities, and is based on one of the underlying philosophies, ‘nothing about us without us’. Creating resources with self-advocates improves the quality of the resource as people with lived experience are able to make contributions that otherwise might not have been considered.

When talking to the people at Bury People First, who are a self-advocacy group run by people with learning disabilities, we were able to gain insight into the importance of Signalong and who needs to learn it. This will influence the project going forward, as the suggestions from the self-advocates can be carried out in the future, with more funding from the Lottery Community Fund.

We discussed with Bury People First the importance of learning Signalong. They outlined how signing can benefit people with learning disabilities in a multitude of ways:

Signalong can be used alongside speech to help people with both expressive communication and understanding of what their communication partner is saying to them.
They also mentioned how signing is a beneficial communication tool for people with hearing difficulties, which affect a large number of people with learning disabilities.
When asked who should learn Signalong, it was established that it is really important for professionals to know how to communicate effectively, especially those working in emergency services such as firemen, paramedics, police and health staff.
It is also important for employers to be trained in signing, as this could reduce the inequalities in the amount of people with learning disabilities who are employed.
The advocates said that primary school children should all be taught signing so that they can use it in the future, and therefore teachers should be trained in Signalong.

At Total Communication Services CIC, we want to be able to carry out the suggestions made by the self-advocates, which is why running more training sessions to be able to teach signing to all of the people described above is so important.

We also discussed when you could use Signalong, and one key point was the importance of signing in helping people with learning disabilities to make informed choices. Being presented with information alongside signs can make it much clearer to understand. Furthermore, if professionals are trained in signing, then when carrying out capacity assessments, they will be able to accurately identify whether someone has capacity, as they may be communicating this non-verbally through signs.

The people at Bury People First also described how they enjoy learning signing through singing, watching Youtube videos, playing games, relating signs to physical objects and hand on hand signing. These are all methods that we have incorporated within the project and would love to expand on further in future training.

See our YouTube channel for signing films: https://www.youtube.com/@TotalCommunicationServicesCIC

Photos from our session