1.2 Facts and figures on deafness

The following facts and figures will help you put your learning into context. You can then apply what you have learned from this course into everyday life should you meet a deaf or hard of hearing person or if you need to create a learning environment for an individual or group of deaf students.

As you can see in Activity 2 there is a large proportion of the UK population who have a hearing loss. If we take the population of the UK to be around about 67 million people, it would be true to say that 1 in 6 people in the population have a hearing loss.

According to figures published by Action on Hearing Loss and National Deaf Children's Society (NDCS) there are around 50,000 children with a hearing loss.

Of course, not everybody who has a hearing loss will learn sign language. According to the British Deaf Association (BDA), there are around 151,000 Deaf individuals who use British Sign Language (BSL) in the UK.