Deafness in Society:  Session 4

Clark Denmark

4.0: How Many Deaf People

4.1 Where to begin?

So how many Deaf people are there? Although there are few direct studies of incidence coupled to social studies, which would determine the size of the Deaf population, good estimates can be made on the basis of published work. At its simplest level, we can predict that between one in 2,000 people will have a severe-to-profound hearing loss. While some of these will be in the margins, because of additional problems (the incidence of other difficulties is higher in those with a hearing loss) and because of choice not to associate with other Deaf people, their numbers will be balanced by those partially hearing people who marry into the community or who choose sign language as a primary communication. A crude projection would give the UK a Deaf population of 25,000 - 30,000 people - a more detailed analysis is given below. The age characteristics of this population should broadly match those of the hearing population - i.e. it is a population whose average age is becoming older.

4.2 Working with the available statistics

The following section draws on work carried out by Sally Reynolds for the Deaf Health in Scotland Project (1996).

There are several ways in which we can achieve an estimate of the number of Deaf people in the UK. The first is by using the predicted incidence of deafness at birth and attaching this to all the population statistics for births throughout the years which would apply to the community. This is problematic as it gives only a medical-audiological estimate of hearing loss and does not imply directly, participation in the community by those with a specified hearing loss. That is, measured hearing loss does not equate directly with community membership.

The second is to use educational statistics. This is justifiable since the majority of Deaf Community members will have gone through a school for the deaf.

In both cases there are limitations on the extent of the data available and in the accuracy of the information. We have examined statistics more widely but these do not provide a sufficient base for a good estimate. A more effective estimate based on the population change and the year of birth is provided below.

4.3 Searching for Statistics

4.3.1 Europe

As a first step official statistics of the EU were consulted. These tend to produce estimates which are way above what we commonly believe to be true: 33% of the adult working population have an impairment and 19% have a disability. Eleven per cent are expected to have a disability related to language, speech, vision or hearing. This reduces finally to a prediction of hearing problems for 2.65 million people in the UK. This will include those who acquire a hearing loss. Throughout these sets of official statistics the numbers seem to be inflated and unreliable. Source: Eurostat, p137.

4.3.2 Educational Provision

The BATOD (British Association of Teachers of the Deaf) directory for England, Scotland and Wales has some information on schools with Deaf students:

Table 4.1: Educational Provision (BATOD survey) - Numbers of each

The above data from the BATOD directory could be considered the most up to date information available. This data was collected in January 1994.

4.3.3 Recorded Children

The Scottish Office Statistical Bulletin entitled `Provision of Education for Pupils with Special Educational Needs` published February 1995 shows pupils with records of needs in education authority primary and secondary schools at September 1993 in Scotland.

Pupils with hearing difficulties are shown to represent 5.7% (132 pupils out of 2,301) of those recorded with special needs in primary schools. In addition, 6.1% (139 pupils out of 2,267) of those recorded with special needs in secondary schools have a hearing problem. In total 271 pupils are recorded in Scotland with hearing difficulties. (If projected equally across the age range, this would imply 19,320 people who had been recorded - i.e. 19,230 Deaf people in the UK population.) This probably means that there is an under-recording of potential Deaf Community members.

4.3.4 Hearing Aids

The office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) does not record Deaf people specifically. However they record difficulty with hearing: by gender and age, 1992.

Table 4.2: Hearing Difficulties in the Population (OPCS)

Source: OPCS, 1995

The General Household Survey does not specifically record Deaf people, only people who have a tinnitus problem.

4.3.4 Handicap

The Department of Health and Social Security published the numbers of people registered handicapped in Britain in 1970. Deaf people are covered in this survey.

Table 4.3 Handicap Register (1970)

Source: Social Trends 1995.

4.3.5 Screening

The MRC Institute of Hearing Research based at Nottingham University reports that the incidence of congenital deafness is 1.1 per 1000 live births for hearing losses of >40dB and 1.1 per 4000 for profoundly Deaf (>95dB). This implies that 880 children will be born in England, Scotland and Wales each year with a moderate hearing impairment (40dB or greater), of whom 220 (25%) will have a profound impairment (>95dB). In addition there is acquired deafness. By the age of 5 years a further 100 children in each birth cohort year will acquire an impairment, about 60 to 80 of whom will have a profound loss. So the total number of children in each year goes up to 980 with about 280-300 of them having a profound loss. This gives a figure on the high side for the Deaf Community - 70,000 mild to profound losses in the UK and 19,000 profoundly deaf.

The MRC Institute of Hearing Research based in Glasgow, sees no regional variation of deafness in the UK once they have taken out effects of age, sex and socio-economic status.

4.3.6 Incidence Figures

Scottish Office Statistics show the population of Scotland in 1994 as 5.1 million (UK 58.2 m). Of these 2.5 million are males. The relative age distribution is shown in Table 2.5. An estimate provided by the Institute of Hearing Research in Glasgow indicates that 1.1 per thousand live births will have a hearing loss of 40dB and that of these, one quarter will have losses of over 95dB. We can insert these predictions into the population statistics.
Table 4.4: Scotland’s Distribution of hearing loss by age, predicted in 1994 (proportion of the published general population figures).

This gives an overall figure of 1,402 profoundly Deaf people and 5,608 people with a mild to profound hearing loss. These figures can be multiplied by 11.2 to give the estimate for the UK of 15,702 for profoundly deaf people an 62,809 with a mild to profound hearing loss.

Although the figures are quite large, there is a great variation from one area to another. The figures imply very small populations in the outlying areas. This has major implications for services.

In these figures, the estimate of the changes in the Deaf population is linked to the general population trends, showing that there has been a slow increase in the size of the Deaf population. These figures are based on the same proportionate estimates of the general population. A better estimate can be obtained when we can examine the Deaf school figures in terms of the age of the children. Here we can see that there is a general decline in the Deaf school population over the period from 1930. There are several gaps - the war years and also since 1982, when the DfEE stopped collecting statistics by type of problem. As a result we have no up-to-date figures for Deaf children in school. Part of the decline is due to the change in policy, so that more Deaf children are integrated and partly there is better provision of hearing aids and so the partially-hearing children tend not to appear in the statistics any longer. It seems likely that the Deaf Community has become more Deaf over the years although it would be very hard to obtain reliable measures of this.

We are therefore left with a figure between the populations shown in Figure 4.1 (to be handed out in lecture). This has projections across the points where we have no data and it has components estimated by taking Scotland as a proportion of the UK.

The figures shown in Figure 4.1 are for people between the ages of 16 years and 76 years. If we extend this proportionally downwards to include children from birth, the total figure we obtain for the UK is 26,096 former Deaf school pupils and 47,028 Deaf and partially Deaf. We can also see that this population is declining. That is although the percentage of people with a hearing loss remains much the same, there is a reduction in the number of Deaf school students and probably as a result, a reduction in the size of the Deaf Community. It is our expectation that this is not solving the problem of Deafness but that it is creating a sub-group of Deaf people who do not have the benefits of Deaf Community resources. We would expect this problem to be seen later in life in higher levels of mental ill-health.