Education and rehabilitation of deaf children with cochlear implants: a multidisciplinary task

In the last decade the population of deaf children has changed dramatically in a lot of countries, especially in those where universal neonatal hearing screening, early multi-disciplinary support, digital hearing aids and cochlear implants are available. Most of these children can acquire intelligible spoken language and choose spoken language as their main means of communication and for access to education, because they go to mainstream schools in larger proportions, and fewer to schools for the deaf. Mainstream placement does not eliminate the need for services, which will vary depending upon the child's age, language modality, and other child specific factors. But there is also evidence that the outcomes after paediatric implantation are very heterogeneous. All this is a big change for the educational services. We must ensure that their staff have the skills to meet these challenges: to be flexible, continually updated with the technology and changing expectations (ongoing professional training), to provide an environment which will utilise the hearing while meeting the linguistic and curricular needs of the children, to meet the psycho-social needs of this group as they grow through adolescence, and to work with other professionals. Now, and looking ahead, the challenge for deaf education is also to embrace the diversity of this population and to appropriately address the specific needs of each child.