ADRIAN CHRIMES, HEARING RESOURCE BASE, KENNET SCHOOL, UK
Introduction
In 2022, I took on the role of teacher-in-charge of the Hearing Resource Base at Kennet School, a large secondary school in West Berkshire. I immediately found myself trying to balance the need to support students academically without compromising their fledgling independence. This article outlines the ways in which my team adapted our approach to place greater emphasis on independence and responsibility.
The setting
The Hearing Resource Base (HRB) has the capacity to support up to 10 deaf students, each with a diagnosis of permanent, severe to profound hearing loss, meaning that without hearing aids or cochlear implants, they cannot access speech sounds. Each student is also the subject of an education, health and care plan (EHCP). As a result, they come to the HRB in Year 7 from a primary setting that has provided additional support, often in the form of a teaching assistant (TA).
During my first term in post, I worked with a Year 12 student who had spent his entire education supported by a TA. This student (referred to as J) had failed to achieve a single passing grade at GCSE, attempting the first few questions of a paper before giving up. He presented as lazy, disorganised and generally aloof, but when I talked to him about his interests, I found that he was quite knowledgeable and engaged.
In subsequent observations, I saw my colleagues dutifully sit beside J, repeat the teacher’s instructions, reframe the content and act as a partner during pair work. Interaction between the teacher and student was minimal.
Students receiving this kind of support knew that they did not need to focus when the teacher was speaking, remember the instructions or interact with their peers during group work; the TA took on all these responsibilities. Their academic results rarely showed progress, they had no relationship with their teachers, they could not self-advocate and their social circles rarely extended beyond the Resource Base.
The challenge
During my Teacher of the Deaf (ToD) training, I learned about the impact of deafness on child development, specifically the impact of delayed language acquisition on cognitive development, such as theory of mind and executive function. With regard to theory of mind (ToM), Schick et al. (2007) found that deaf children of hearing parents struggled to engage in abstract reasoning due to their delayed language. ToM allows one to infer what someone else is thinking or feeling and to recognise or predict another’s point of view. Children with delayed language find it difficult to socially integrate with their peers, due to their inability to empathise, communicate, collaborate and resolve conflict.
Similarly, executive function (EF) includes the development of working memory, emotional self-regulation and cognitive flexibility (Marschark and Hauser, 2012). EF starts to develop between 12 and 36 months, as children enter the critical period of language acquisition (Diamond, 2012). It is language that enables EF as we start to name, order and categorise information (Bialystok et al., 2010).
J was my real-world example of what happens when cognitive development is not nurtured. While the additional support he had received since primary school had supported his academic outcomes, carefully scaffolding learning tasks and focusing on acquiring new vocabulary, the same attention had not been given to his cognitive development. As a result, when the academic support was withdrawn during exams, J did not have the cognitive skills he needed. Worryingly, I was starting to identify similar behaviours in younger students.
In Year 7 maths, students were making the same progress as their hearing peers until assessments started to include more worded questions rather than simple number problems. In Year 9, students struggled to remember the formulas and procedures for completing multi-step problems in science. Key Stage 4 students could recall key terms and dates in history and geography, but they could not organise their learning into long-form answers that showcased their knowledge. Hours were being spent with students, but little quantifiable progress was being made.
The changes
TA proximity
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF, 2025) highlights the importance of TAs not replacing teachers, so the first action was to have the TAs sit away from their students. Instead, they would check in with the student after teacher input to check for understanding and offer support as needed. Within a matter of weeks, these same students realised that it was as easy to ask the teacher as to wait for the TA. Our students also stopped coming to the Resource to meet their TA before going to lessons. I noticed teacher names being used more in one-to-ones and a book-look showed that students were engaging more with the do-it-now recall activities at the start of every lesson, and their half-termly quiz results were improving by 10 to 20 per cent.
Questioning
The EEF (2025) also emphasises the importance of questioning. We incorporated the Question Matrix, as championed by the Teacher Toolkit blog (2024), so that we could deepen understanding and develop skills like analysis, evaluation, summarisation and synthesis. TA interactions in the classroom became less procedural and started to have an impact not only on academic outcomes but also on enthusiasm and participation. In one-to-ones, I used the same language as the TAs to prompt the cognitive processes being scaffolded in class. As the Year 7s moved through Key Stage 3, I would hear them asking themselves the same questions that their TAs used to ask them, such as ‘Where have I seen that before?’ and ‘How can I develop this?’
Responsibility
As students became actively engaged in their learning, I asked TAs not to intervene when students had forgotten their equipment or had failed to complete their homework. Instead, we taught our students strategies to help them to prepare for the day, week or term – visual checklists, reminders on phones, notes on the whiteboard in the Resource – so that when the teacher did challenge missed homework, the student could face the same consequences as their peers. This approach led to better integration in the class and a more appropriate relationship with the TAs.
Targeted intervention
With students taking on greater responsibility for their learning, I was able to withdraw some classroom support and make better use of TAs’ subject specialisms. We worked closely with teachers to identify specific needs and gaps in knowledge. The TAs began delivering short-term and targeted interventions in the Resource, teaching mainstream content to consolidate or deepen understanding. Again, the outcome was greater integration within the peer group and more active engagement in lessons.
Impact
Quantitative progress was slow at first; however, as our approach became embedded, we began to see positive results. The Year 7 students ended Key Stage 3 with average scores a whole grade higher than at the start of Year 8. All three of them moved up ability sets in English, maths and science, with one of them moving into the top set for history. Two of the three Key Stage 4 students achieved a minimum of six GCSEs at grades 4 or above, and all were accepted onto their preferred post-16 courses. Three of the five Key Stage 5 students achieved the required grades needed to secure places at their first-choice universities. The remaining two Key Stage 5 students are pursuing apprenticeships through the local authority’s training consortium.
Final thoughts
The great strength of our Resource Base is the knowledge we have of our students. The problem is that this proximity can lead to a blurred understanding of responsibilities. Clarifying the role of TA empowered not only the staff but the students as well. At social times, the resource base is now quiet; the students are either attending a club or out with their friends. The TAs are proactive and our lunchtime discussions revolve around what our students have achieved rather than lamenting what they cannot do. We have learned that inclusion does not require us to lower our standards; instead, we look for opportunities to support our students to rise to them.
Read more from In Praxis: SEND and Inclusion
