Deaf schools: love, friendship and equality

After a failed last-ditched merger attempt with a sister school, Ovingdean Hall in Brighton is just the latest of many deaf schools to shut. There are now just 31 remaining in the whole of the UK. Barely a term goes by without stories of one more fighting closure, having their building taken away from them, or resisting being merged with another school.

Whatever your opinion is on educational policy, the politics of special schools versus mainstream units, or even whether deaf children should be educated in sign language or through the spoken method, there is another story being played out. As each deaf school closes ... the door shuts on another little piece of deaf history.

As well as being places of education, deaf schools are where friendships are formed, where couples fall in love, where people take a journey from childhood to being an adult. Much like any other school, you might say. Except that deaf schools have an importance within the deaf community that goes beyond that.

Along with deaf centres and sports clubs, the schools are one of the key places that deaf people meet other deaf people, giving them the chance to later go on and become part of the deaf community.

For many, the schools represent a place where they first felt 'normal' among peers who faced the same problems they faced, and crucially, communicated the way they did. Many struggled in mainstream schools, yet when they were educated among other deaf children, felt as though they could express themselves for the first time.

My parents went to a grammar school for the deaf. When I was a child, I spent hours listening to stories and memories from their school days. Forty years later, they still keep in touch with many old friends, and when they meet up, reel off the names of people in the years above and below them, talking about how they're getting on as if they were members of a big, extended deaf family.

The school was where they first felt that being deaf was nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about. The sense of being like a close family was encouraged by the fact that many of them were boarders, only going home at weekends or the end of term, so they learned to support each other in the absence of their families.

Undoubtedly, they also had hard times. Homesickness, arguments with one another, teenage angst, or even a shared loathing of one or two of their teachers! However, those negative experiences also helped them learn to cope with some of the challenges they would face later in life.

I heard so much about Mum and Dad's adventures - which bore more than a passing resemblance to Enid Blyton stories - that I started to dream of going there myself.

When I was coming up to secondary school age, my parents took me there for a visit, and we walked through wooden panelled hallways and idyllic forested grounds that were just begging to host a game of Harry Potter's Quidditch, as cool young deaf people strolled around.

I wanted to go, but in the end, it was recommended that I go to the mainstream school in our local area. I was disappointed, but glad I could carry on going to school with my friends, and go home to my family every night. As the years went by, I forgot all about it.

It was only ten years later, when I was working with a deaf colleague, that I got a glimpse of the world I could have lived in. She kept a few videos on the next desk and one day I asked her what was on them. We were working in TV at the time and I expected they'd be full of some discarded interviews for the show. Instead she put one of them in, and pressed play. It was a home video of a weekend at the grammar school.

As she walked through the corridors, through people's bedrooms into what looked like a TV room, different heads kept popping up, happy teenagers messing about, sharing in-jokes, signing towards camera. It looked like a deaf version of the nineties TV series Dawson's Creek, except without all the cheesiness and teenage introspection. Just the nice heart-warming bits.

As I watched the video, I realised I could have been watching myself on that screen. I could have been part of that group, feeling like I really belonged, with other deaf people my age. It's not that I didn't have close friends at the mainstream comprehensive I attended, I did, but what I was watching was a sense of brotherhood that went beyond friendship. I was seeing bonds that would last for life. The same bonds my parents had.

As each deaf school closes, I'm left with worries for the children. Will they be as happy at their next school? And will the friendships they've made, survive being interrupted as they go back to living many miles apart, attending schools where they might be able to count the number of deaf pupils on one hand.

I also can't help but feel a sense of sadness for the friendships that will never form, and the deaf children who will never get to meet each other in the future, as those doors shut for the last time.