Wirral Student Attends Labour Party Conference

Labour Party Hear Student’s Views

 In October, student Bethany Eason from Bebington High Sports College was chosen to represent the NDCS (National Deaf Childrens Society ) and travel with Alison Mcgovern, MP for Wirral South to the Labour Party Conference to discuss her experiences as a young deaf person in the UK and what changes she felt needed to be made by the government.  

Bethany who is a profoundly deaf with a cochlear implant, recently applied and was accepted onto the National Deaf Childrens Society’s Youth advisory Board.    In July she attended her first residential in Birmingham and then after being picked from 45,000 deaf young people from the UK, she was chosen to represent the NDCS and put her point of view over at the Labour Party Conference.  At the Conference, as well meeting various MP’s, Bethany was interviewed by Jon Snow from Channel 4 news and Adam Boulton from Sky news; she was also chosen to write two articles for the Buzz website about party conference training outlining her views. 

Furthermore in November, Bethany travelled to London for another residential and met up with other members of the NDCS.  Whilst there she was interviewed and filmed giving her views by BBC Scotland.   Bethany has also been picked to meet up with TV actress Rachel Shenton (from Hollyoaks) for an interview next week. 

Bethany’s aim is to ‘spread the word’ about young people and deafness and has stated that people like her will struggle in the future due to one in three councils cutting down services for deaf young people, which she feels should be stopped immediately.   The young NDCS have started a petition called ‘Stolen Futures’ which needs to have over 100,000 signatures by May 2013,  details of which can be found on their website  www.ndcs.org.uk