I bring the committee back to the second panel that we have this morning. We have Heather Gray, National Deaf Children's Society, Rachel O'Neill, Murray House School of Education, Dr Roger Cameron, Child Protection Research Centre and Catherine Finiston, British Association of Teachers of the Deaf Scotland. I welcome all of you this morning for attending. We are just going to go straight to questions and can I begin the questions with Mark Griffin? I wanted to go into questions around issues around teachers of the deaf in Schools in Scotland. Just kick off around the shortage, you would have heard it in written evidence from Aberdeen Council about the age profile of teachers of the deaf and the majority of qualified staff are in their mid to late ffifties to see whether they agree with that and what needs to be done now to bridge that gap between boosting the numbers to an acceptable level as the ultimate ambition but just covering for the staff who are going to be leaving the service in next 10 to 15 years. I trained 39 years ago and at that time the Government had ring-fenced funding and it meant that all local authorities had the opportunity to appoint people to go on the training. We did one full-time years course so people committed themselves to that year and became qualified. When the colleges and universities merged, they had to ensure that the modules were in line with the universities. It was done as a modular course, initially eight modules over a period of up to five years. Circumstances changed for people over five years. People get married, they have children, etc. At that time, there was also a monetary incentive to do the course. It was not a lot, I think it was in the region of £200 and something, but it was some incentive to do the qualification, whereas now there is no incentive. What you find is teachers who are extremely interested in working in deaf education apply for the courses. Some have to pay themselves, some have to go to authorities and ask for funding. If that is agreed, they continue with their day job and have to do the modules in addition to that, so it can take quite a lot of time and you do not get the same. It is only the people who really want to do the job that will commit themselves to that, but other people will not. It has caused a national shortage. When you advertise for teachers of the deaf, qualified teachers of the deaf, you rarely get any applicants. If you are lucky, you will get one. I would like to talk about the course from the university point of view, because I run the postgraduate diploma at Murray House. We have some people coming on the course quite in life, and we know that out there there are 30% of teachers working with deaf children who are unqualified, so local authorities are sometimes not sending us people. The people who come usually are highly motivated. One thing I would like to see is more deaf people coming forward, and that is quite a difficult thing, because getting through to becoming qualified as a teacher and then finding out about the possibilities once you are working in a local authority, mean we do not often get, for example, people with fluent sign language coming through. The age profile is quite old, that is true, but some authorities, I think that Falkirk is one of them, have made provision in advance by looking round for younger teachers, and Fife is another council who has done this as well, looking at for very good teachers who they see in mainstream and attracting those to a service and then sending them on the diploma. It depends on the authority's perspective. Small authorities, rural authorities struggle, I think, most. Dr Cameron? I mean, I think that some of the history about deaf teaching would be instructive at this point. There are so few teachers because deaf people are only allowed to become deaf teachers very recently, and it took a concerted amount of lobbying to change the rules to allow deaf people to train at all to become teachers of the deaf, and that is why we have got so few. One of the preconditions of becoming a qualified teacher was you had to be able to hear what was going on in the back of the classroom. Now clearly a lot of deaf people who are qualified and intelligent enough to become teachers weren't able to do so because of those rules, and I was one of those people. I'm very thankful for that rule change that allowed me to qualify, but if we're looking at why there's such a dearth of deaf people as teachers of the deaf, that's the reason. We need to make a concerted and proactive effort to build that share of the teacher of the deaf population that are deaf to a much higher level. Thank you. Just to think again about those statistics, there are 200 teachers of the deaf in Scotland according to the consortium for research and deaf education, and over a third of those are unqualified. We've seen through the cry report in the last few years quite a significant decline, so we know that over 50 per cent of teachers of the deaf will retire in 10 to 15 years. We also know that it is incredibly difficult to attract teachers because there isn't the incentives that Cathy spoke about, so the additional qualification does not bring with it any additional responsibility allowance, which I think is a major factor. I think that we have a piece of work to do in terms of promoting the work of teachers of the deaf and the huge impact that it has for children and how it can really transform children's lives too. I think that there is work to be done on really promoting the work of the teachers of the deaf and really starting to address this quite significant reduction that we're seeing and the difficulties in getting young people into the profession. I think that it's absolutely right that we should be supporting and encouraging more deaf young people to become teachers of the deaf. Interestingly, we've got three of our young campaigners that are interested in becoming teachers of the deaf and that is really important in terms of just giving young people the confidence to aspire to go into the profession. We have work to do on promoting the profession and the impact that it can have and the transformational change that it can make. Just to pick up on a point, Dr Cameron made about the qualifications of teachers of the deaf in particular with BSL. Currently, the standard is for BSL level one and I was struck by a comment that Dr Cameron said that previously teachers weren't allowed to teach unless they could hear what was going on in the back of the classroom, but a teacher who only has BSL level one won't know what his or her own pupils will be signing in the classroom, so surely they weren't qualified to be in the classroom either, which seems to be a disparity. What are your views on the level of BSL qualification that teachers have and what you think that could be the impact on pupils learning when some pupils have a much higher standard of BSL than the teachers themselves? Right, it's very unfair. It can have a serious detrimental impact on their learning. If the language that's been used by the person who's instructing them isn't clear and they have a low skill level of British Sign Language, simple mistakes can be made. If you think about the English term iron, FE in the scientific world as an abbreviation, and we've seen examples of people in the classroom using this sign for iron as in the thing that you iron your clothes with, those are the kind of mistakes that are being made and isolated deaf children in a mainstream environment are able to work out what that's supposed to be. It's crucial that the sign language is fluent and has a standard that allows the deaf child to conceptualise what they're learning. You talked, Mark, about level 1. We do a lot of work in the centre and at the university about developing science signs, but none of this knowledge is being transferred or it's not being replicated anywhere. There are such good examples of work going on, but what's clearly happening is that if the sign language standard in the school is not clear and it's not good enough, then the kids have got no chance of learning. When we develop these sign-signs together as a group, you're talking about a large group of experts from the areas of science, linguistics, all those areas coming together and doing enough of a lot of hard work just to get those concepts out in sign language. What we're doing at the Scottish Century Centre is helping teachers teach both deaf and hearing kids, because I'll give you an example. If you think about the concepts mass, does the committee know what mass is? Can you describe what mass of volume is? It's very difficult, isn't it, just through the English word? When you think about gravity, I'm sure you're all familiar with gravity. In sign language, the fist that I'm using here is the sign for mass. Everything's there. The gravity is the force that's acting on an object. We have this sign, gravity, as in to come down to earth. OK? As Mary quietly showed with the pen. If you put the two together, conceptually, visually, you have weight. That is what weight is as a concept. You can see how visually superior that is to try to explain something in English. Not only are deaf kids going to benefit if we can use sign language with them, everybody's going to benefit. Can you imagine trying to explain to a deaf child without the teacher of the deaf who might not be there in lip-speaking mass volume? They're not going to get it. If you've got somebody who can sign like that, then they're going to get the concepts immediately. So it's incredibly disappointing that we allow teachers of the deaf to qualify with only level 1 BSL. I quite agree. I think it's a great science lesson, Audrey. The work of the Scottish Science Centre Glossary is very important in telling teachers of deaf children and communication support workers about new signs and concepts that they can use. The current advice that we have from the government, and it's the government advice, is level 1, is the same all over the UK, and it is no way near enough for people who use sign language. What's more, it keeps teachers of the deaf assuming, that regulation keeps people assuming that most deaf children are not going to use much sign. In my submission, and in the submission from the British Deaf Association, we saw that actually there are larger numbers in children using some sort of sign than other parts of the UK. We know as well that teachers of the deaf, when they work with signing pupils, often how level 2 is what they regard as a good level. If you took to people in the deaf community, they are shocked by this because level 6 is regarded as a good level for people who are interpreting. Level 3 is seen as a minimum. When I say level 3, I mean something like a higher in a language. Now, if any of you have got a higher in a modern language, could you teach in it? That is the level which we're seeing as the minimum level for teachers of deaf children. Now, that's what I say to my students, that the government regulation says level 1, or more as appropriate, and that vagueness of the language more as appropriate is very unhelpful. So, I feel that in Scotland we're in an interesting position now with the BSL Bill, and I expect that guidance to be revised upwards. Whether it's revised for all teachers of deaf children, or whether it's revised for those teachers working with signing students and the under-fives, I don't know yet which way it will go. But I think that we've got to remember that when we're talking about the word deaf in the Scottish context, we're talking about two quite different groups of children. There is some overlap between them, and the signing pupils at the moment are not getting a good deal. Thank you. Can I just put this in a bit of perspective? 71 per cent of peripathetic hearing impairment services in Scotland don't have any teachers qualified to BSL level 3 or beyond, and there are actually six services in Scotland where there are teachers with no qualifications in BSL, so I think that gives a sense of the dimension really of the challenge that we face just now, too. We recently had a deaf learners conference, we had 21 BSL users at that conference, and they very strongly and clearly told us that they needed to have support, which was far more fluent than they currently had, if they were going to succeed and to really achieve their potential. I think that we really need to listen to the voices of those young people coming from that deaf learners conference and identify the need to do something about this, but those are certainly the statistics just now in relation to BSL qualifications and teachers of the deaf in Scotland today. Thank you, Mark. Colin Beattie. Can I start just with a little plea for plain English in some of the submissions? When I look at a sentence like part of the solution is to transmogrify the educator from adhering to the sophisticated deficit model to one that generates empowerment of the pupil, I can barely get it out. No, it's no one here. It's no one here. To be fair, I think, from one of the first panel members. Just for clarity. I don't think that it was end here. Anyway, I just plea for plain English. I was going to ask a little bit about some of the suggestions that have been made in terms of technology support and how that could best be introduced to give the biggest impact on pupils with hearing difficulties or sensory impairment. What would give the biggest hit? Well, where I am in Falkirk, we have sound field systems that we're installing into all the primary 1, 2 and 3 classes, into classes where we have children with unilateral losses, severe conductive losses, and we're finding that that's benefitting all of the children in the classroom. It's also benefitting the teacher because it helps the teacher's voice. You don't have to project it as loudly. All of the children, regardless of where they are in the class, get the same level of volume from the teacher. There are also modern radio aid systems that are discrete, and any of the children that we have that will benefit from a radio aid system will be supplied with one, but they cost about £1,000 each. We've had people writing and asking how we go about... There's a single teacher of the deaf in an authority, and they're saying how we go about getting a radio aid system and funding for that, or for a sound field system within our authority. It's very much at the hands of the education services whether there's funding for that. Is that the one major adaptation that you think would make a huge impact? I think that in technology children also have laptops. That would be the major one for us because it means that if they're wearing a radio aid system, regardless of where they are in the class, they will always hear the teacher's voice at the same volume and be tuned into what is happening. Just taking an example of what some local authorities do. For example, in my own Midlothian local authority, when schools are closed due to snow or in climate weather, children's homework is made available through smartphones or through the internet. How are sensory impaired children impacted by that? Does it disadvantage them hugely? Are there adaptations that could be done to that to enable them to carry on with their education? Children are able to access support through glow and that can roll out all of the children if the parent supply can be signed up for that. So there isn't a disadvantage there. Very often, if a child is ill or off, the parent will contact the school and ask for work to be sent home. The teacher will do her best to present challenging but homework that they're going to be able to cope with. If that's not possible, then the teacher of the deaf in our authority will go out and do a home visit and tutor the child. Technology is obviously very important, but what underlies that will be a bilingual education that empowers deaf children. If they're able to read, then they're going to be able to work from home, the same as any other child. If they're given language when they're born and they grow up confident using sign language and English in a bilingual way, then they shouldn't have any problems. They should be able to access the written English just the same as their hearing peers. If they're hearing peers, they shouldn't have to rely on technology for everything. I wanted to say about technology. I don't think that there's one technological hit that will solve the problem, because, as Audrey said, the issue mainly is access to an early language. In Scotland, what we need more of is educational audiologists. We don't have enough. Those people can make the technological adjustments that are needed in local authorities, especially if they were able to work across many local authorities. Authorities are reluctant to employ one because perhaps they don't have enough work for one, so it seems an obvious job to give an essential service such as the SSC to work in many local authorities. Those people can fit radio aid systems. They can advise on sound field systems. They can advise parents. They're very, very valuable. They're basically teachers of deaf children and, in Scotland, we need more of them. Is there an example of a local authority that employs one? Yes, five employs one. There is one freelance who's working across some local authorities in the west. Falkirk has got one. It's been hard to recruit as well, hasn't it? Yes. It's very difficult to recruit, because there are so few of them. Do we know how many there are through Scotland? Five. That's a significant reduction over the last few years. Often what we're seeing is if post-holders leave, those posts are not being replaced. That certainly was the case in Ayrshire and in the Lothian. We're seeing a reduction. One of the points I was going to make was just that of actually there's no point in having the technology if we don't have the expertise to use it properly. Again, a very strong message coming through from the deaf learners conference was a young people saying that the teachers don't know how to use technology. One of the young people gave this really funny incidence of where the teacher hadn't switched off the radio mic and the kids heard the whole conversation that went on in the staff room. It's quite a fundamental point, but our young people are telling us that it's critical that our staff actually know how to use the technology that we've got. On the reduction in educational audiologists, we need to ensure that there's a solution. Ayrshire has skilled up one of their teachers of the deaf to be a specialist. There are ways to do this, but it's clearly an issue that not everybody has the skills and expertise to use the technology that we do have properly. Is there any indication that councils are increasingly sharing that resource? No, the opposite actually is. At times of cuts, they're tending not to share. Obviously, we had an education audiologist based in Edinburgh who also worked with all the Lothians, and that has been not replaced because the authorities couldn't agree. The service has definitely deteriorated as a result. The children used to have excellent service from that education audiologist right the way through from 0 to 18. Sorry, can I see? I think one of the other difficulties is that there isn't any training for educational audiologists in Scotland. There isn't any of the universities that provide that. I think one other further point is there isn't actually any consistency between the audiologists that do exist in Scotland, so there isn't a job description for an educational audiologist. It's quite inconsistent, so... You have skill level. Well, the qualification is going to... Sorry, I'll do it. I mean, it does obviously make sense to have a better use of technology and also to centralise services across authorities and make good use of resources and not only hardware and software resources, but the people resources. Rather than seeing authorities wasting money trying to provide these services on their own, an economy of scale has to be able to be leveraged. Sorry, Rachel. Is that you, Colin? Okay, before we move on, I'm going to just take a short suspension at the moment for just a five-minute break, because you don't mind. Okay, we'll just move on now with Chick Brody. Thank you. Good morning. In the papers that we got, there's a quote from the Scottish Council on Deafness highlighting the importance of multi-agency information. The code is under the universal newborn hearing screening programme. Children are picked up in a hearing test that happens as part of health tests in the first six weeks. Now, we've heard at the earlier session in terms of vision impairment that we have no idea really as to... There is a spectrum, of course, but no idea of the actual numbers that are involved. We're told as far as hearing is concerned that screening is recorded within the NHS databases at a local level, but our understanding is that this information has not always shared effectively across the different services, potentially creating missed opportunities for early interventions and support for the children and families. Do you agree with that? Fundamentally, we need to know how many children we're dealing with for early intervention, for starting the language learning process, something crucial for a deaf baby to have access to a visual language really from as close to day one as we can get it, so it's very important. I have other concerns about the newborn screening test. My personal experience when I had a baby myself, we were given that because both my husband and I are deaf, the test was administered the next day. I knew that she was hearing instinctively, I thought that everything was going to be fine, and straight away the person said, oh no, we're going to refer your baby straight away to a speech and language therapist, even though they're perfectly hearing. I thought, well, hang on a second, you don't know my background, you don't know who I am. I'm from a hearing family, I grew up with a hearing family myself. My daughter, who is now 10, is fluently bilingual, by the way, so none of those fears, she speaks just as clearly as everybody else, but I can imagine what their attitudes are going to be like with hearing parents who have a deaf baby the other way around. I was upset, my daughter had just been born, it's the day after. I put myself into the hearing parents position, and I think that the health services and settings need to know how to work with the social side of things, having positive role models, getting deaf adults in there, not to have this negative attitude of, oh dear, your child's deaf, and seeing it as a necessarily negative thing, but the health services do need to be plugged in, but they also need to be making parents aware of all the different life possibilities and all the different avenues that their deaf child can undertake and to know that deaf people do regularly strive for and achieve their dreams in many walks of life. That's very helpful, but I suppose that the most important people that we've talked about, teachers are very important, the curriculum is very important, the methods are very important, but at the end of the day, the parents are absolutely critical from day one. What measures would you support in terms of improvements in multi-agency working to support parents from day one and in the early years? Rachel? I'd just like to refer you to the Scottish Century Centre Early Years Standards, which were developed by a group of practitioners and parents in 2011, and they set out ways that the agencies can work together, seeing the parents at the centre of the team. That attitude about putting the parents at the centre is quite difficult for some agencies to realise. We know we've got the benefit of newborn screening in Scotland, and we've got good pediatric standards, but these standards are not statutory. Education Scotland does not assess with them at all and doesn't actually assess early years services. We know many of those early years services are very, very successful. Angus, for example, has got a very successful service. It's a small authority, but they have got age-appropriate language for all deaf children who have been or nearest to age-appropriate from the age that screening started and as they go on more and more. What they're not getting from newborn screening is mildly deaf children. They are picked up. Children have got mild deafness, but they're not referred straight away. Those sorts of things could be improved a great deal. These guidelines could be made statutory. Education Scotland, HMIE could inspect them. Also, if you look at the BDA recommendations about an early years sign-intensive environment, that could also be very useful for establishing bilingual education for many deaf children because it's an advantage for everybody to have a bilingual experience. I like the way they suggested about having a resource space with a reasonable number of deaf children and deaf adults signing or hearing adults who can sign very fluently. Having a fluent language before you have an implant or having exposure to a fluent language before you have an implant is an example of the signs that you know on to spoken English very well. Deaf children from deaf families do best out of any group when they have an implant because they already have a language before. Early exposure to two languages is a good thing, but it's very hard to organise. That's why I quite like the BDA's response where they were looking in practical detail about how agencies and authorities could co-operate to make that happen. Those are the two steps that I would suggest. Implement those and make them something that HMIE can inspect. Remember the parents at the centre and establish early years bilingual environments. We did have two pilots for local records of deaf children in both Lothian and Tayside which was set up at the back of universal newborn screening and which was all about sharing information and making sure that services were working together. One of the things that we've called for is that we have a national roll-out of that because it creates that environment where services are working together and we're using the information from universal newborn screening to make sure that professionals and services are working together. I would say that what's critical for parents remembering that 90 per cent of parents are hearing who have a deaf child is the role that the third sector can play. All the things that around about deaf role models making sure that parents have impartial advice making sure that there's someone there to navigate them through what can be a really challenging difficult time. GERFEC provides the perfect framework for that but we need to make sure that we're progressing in terms of those GERFEC pathways and that services are truly working together and that parents have got that very practical impartial advice from other parents. Our family support service covers every authority in Scotland our family support workers our parents of deaf children and the kind of practical emotional support is really really important too. I think that there are solutions there and there are things that we know and have learned from the past that we can roll out to improve how services work together and how we can make sure that within that pathway parents get support from other parents. supplementary on that point and I'm grateful to you for raising it. The paragraph 5.1 in the national deaf children's evidence despite the introduction of the universal newborn health screening in 2005 the Scottish Government has not yet published any guidance in terms of post-diagnostic and subsequent early years support for children and families resulting in considerable implications for long term education I hear what Rachel O'Neill mentioned about coming together, but why has it taken 10 years for the Government to produce nothing after the introduction of this universal newborn health screening in 2005? We have got standards, but we don't have them. Government hasn't published, that's what I'm talking about. I think probably it might have been because newborn screening was seen in a very health-orientated way, and there are actually pediatric standards which are very good, but they don't involve what happens next, which is talking to a teacher, talking to language role models. The implementation of the screening has been seen almost entirely as a health issue, and it's obviously not. When you say has not published guidance, I won't repeat what I've said, did you expect them to publish guidance, that's what I'm reading into it, or does the guidance not matter? That's what I'm not understanding. I think guidance is absolutely critical, and I think we've been working on it for 10 years. I think for the reasons that Rachel's describing in terms of health, sorry Audrey. I was just going to say, nobody's listening to deaf people? Perhaps is the reason? Nobody's listening to us? I think we are listening today. I did pick up the, it was Audrey that started on that point, and to be fair I have picked that up. Oh no, the inference was that the Government hasn't been listening for 10 years. All I'm asking, convener, is the Government's guidance in terms of early year support and information, is it critical going forward in terms of support, attainment, etc. for deaf children? Rachel? I'd like to discuss this because I think it is critical. In some local authorities in Scotland there are not enough teachers of the deaf or not enough qualified teachers of the deaf. Occasionally, rather regularly, you hear about children who are language-less at five or six, which is far too late. They are referred at birth, but perhaps they might be getting, I have heard examples quite recently of somebody being aided at three and a half and they've been referred at birth. Nothing much had happened in the meantime. The reason why we need these standards is because there is inconsistency between authorities and some authorities have got very proactive staff, go on extra courses, read a lot, understand the early monitoring protocol which we have, which is English materials about the development of early sign and speech, and they're implementing them, they're monitoring very carefully. Other authorities say to me, I've heard one person say to me, what is the monitoring protocol? Now, that is just shocking. I mean, those children haven't got a chance. Language-less children should not exist, but unfortunately in deaf, well, we meet language-less children, of course they're not going to achieve academically. One of the problems is language-less children often exist in rural areas and they're not allowed to get to a place where they can see sign language used. Yes, Audrey. I'd have to say quite, it's a little bit sad. I mean, I've met language-less people who don't live in the rural area, you know, who are in, you know, urban areas, and it does come back to the fact that the teachers and the support staff that they meet don't know how to sign, their parents don't know how to sign to a significant standard. So what chance do they have, in a sense? But I wouldn't mind going back just quickly to the newborn screening issue. There has been some research from Leeds. I'm sorry, I can't remember the name of the researcher about the emotional attachment with baby. Because of the attitude of health professionals at the point of diagnosis, it doesn't allow either the mother or the father to really effectively bond with their child and celebrate, you know. I mean, everybody's always after the perfect healthy baby, is what we're told. And the screening obviously has an advantage because it picks these things up early. But what it does, of course, is it can run the risk of the parents detaching from the child, starting to feel guilty immediately about that. And no matter what we think, babies pick up on that. They pick up on that quite clearly. So we should be straight away providing a positive environment for those parents saying, look, you know, here's a language that you can access that your child can access. Straight away. Before the newborn screening programme, ironically, parents had that time to bond with their child. My parents didn't know that I was deaf until I was nine months old. But that bond and the love had already been established. That affirmation for me as a human being had already been made. I wasn't seen as deficient or disabled immediately. So a lot more has got to be done in that area to give parents this positive experience rather than an, oh dear, your child's death and everything's negative. And to see it as something that necessarily needs to be repaired. Mary, do you want to move on to... Yes, only one question. That's fine, okay. My questions were actually on data collection and attainment, but so I'll just go to one question and that is our briefing from the Parliament today looks at positive destinations for school leavers with a hearing impairment. So if I look at those with no additional support needs, it's 91.7 and with a hearing impairment, 89.4, which on paper doesn't look too bad. If I just go to further education with no additional support needs, the follow-up destination is 22.5 and with a hearing impairment, 41. Now as an economist I know that below these figures there are many stories to tell, but if you'll forgive me, taking a rough glance at these figures, they look quite good. I find it hard to believe that that's the full story and I would perhaps ask you if positive destinations entry into further education, I have to say higher education is about half for people with a hearing impairment, but behind these figures look quite good, behind the figures are there any concerns you would like to raise with us today? I think you're right to pick out about the difference between further education and higher education, a larger proportion of deaf children go on to further education rather than higher, it's practically reversed, which the reason is largely because of the English level. The research that we've done recently at the University of Edinburgh, the achievements of the Nuffield Foundation funded research about the achievements of deaf pupils in Scotland showed that there were two areas of concern and I showed them in the graph that I put in my submission, which was the English results at S4. You can't see this, but S4, you've got all the levels of deafness category from people with cochlear implants to mildly deaf, profoundly deaf, severely deaf, deaf performing much worse at S4 in English, and then when you get the high flyers, those who you'd expect to be going to university getting level 5 when they're in S4. Again, drastically different results, I mean all the different categories of deafness performing much worse. Now this is because, it must be because of early language experience and also the experience they have right the way through school in support and access to language and the curriculum. So data collection is very important. The other group that I would want to concentrate on is those who leave school with very low level qualifications or no level, no qualifications, which is about 16%. And much, much higher. With a level 3 SEQF qualification, you really can't get onto a very decent college course. So that group of children need much more examination. Who are they? And I expect that many of them are from impoverished backgrounds, which we unfortunately have come to expect in the UK. And many of them would also be probably the language-less children that I talked about before. And many of them perhaps have been unfortunate enough to grow up in areas where they didn't have access to sign language and were profoundly deaf, or they didn't have very good acoustic conditions. So that group of children who achieve poorly, getting SEQF level 3 and below when they leave school, need more study and we need to find out who they are and we need to put targets in, not when they're 16, that's far too late. We need the early years environment and I would say mildly deaf children as much as profoundly deaf children need that support early on. I am concerned in Scotland at the moment about the speech and language therapy cuts, which seem to be very widespread, and I think that the whole range of deaf children in the early years need extra support, much better support from multi-agency groups. I think just to add to what Rachel was saying about that, there is a need for support, but there is also a desperate need for research about what's actually going on in the classroom. When we have got successful learners, why are they successful? What's going on with them? We talk about not enough communication support workers, not enough teachers of the deaf, not enough qualified people there, that's fine, but we do need to find out what's going on in the classroom. I suspect that we are often finding mainstream teachers with one deaf child in their class and perhaps having a teacher of the deaf or a communication support worker or a CSW coming in for a certain amount of time a week and running what is essentially a macro class within the larger class. The classroom teacher isn't directly teaching the deaf child. They're devolving that responsibility to someone else who may not be qualified to deliver that education. I've seen this in evidence myself. There's no way you can expect a child to behave normally in that situation. Of course they're going to be disruptive, they're going to be distracted, they're going to look at the window, they're not going to be paying attention because they're detached from the rest of the class. They're existing within this macro environment, so there's no follow-up from the teacher directly. They're not enjoying anywhere near the level of access to education that all the other kids are, so this inclusive education is actually exclusive. I've been following four deaf children to try and ask them why they don't get involved in asking the teacher questions. That interactive part of someone's education experience is one of the most crucial parts of their learning. We've identified that often the classroom teachers, when they ask a question to the class, as we've seen on the panel today, can put up their hands a lot faster. It's actually 1.2 seconds is all you've got on average before the first kid's hand goes up. When you've got a communication support worker who isn't qualified, how are they supposed to keep the deaf child up, speed up our teacher the deaf even? I've seen teachers of the deaf, I've seen one of them saying, oh, don't worry about it, I'll write it down for you later, I'll tell you later. They don't stand a chance, and therefore the children don't stand a chance, and that's why they're not getting anything out of this supposedly inclusive. What would be better is if we had children in smaller group environments interacting directly with a teacher that was qualified and skilled in the necessary language and cultural aspects to deal with them, not education through a third party. So that deaf children are involved in class discussions, involved in debates, they know what's going on in the whole classroom and they're not feeling isolated as they currently are. We talk about a holistic education experience and life skills and habilitation skills, but we're falling woefully short on all of those measurements when it comes to deaf children. The first step to improving that is to have a look at what's actually going on in the classrooms today, and we don't have an idea, we don't have a picture of that yet. It wouldn't be acceptable, I mean would you take it if it was your child? Would you accept that education for your child? A lot of the communication support workers that are providing the access, they don't have subject knowledge and they don't have fundamentally and crucially the language skills to perform their job. How can you interpret physics if you can barely sign? We need to look at what's going on in the classrooms today. This is one of the reasons why NDCS has been calling on an aspect review of deaf education, because what we've seen and what has come through our research are pockets of excellent practice where this has done exceptionally well in Scotland and other areas where it's incredibly poor. Because teachers of the deaf, who are largely the teachers supporting young people in the mainstream, are not routinely inspected, we do not have a national picture of the quality of support that's going in. I'll repeat it again today. We believe very strongly that what we now need is a full aspect review of deaf education so that we can identify where practice is really good and really learn from it and share that best practice and really get to grips with where it is just not working well. I want to talk about the independence of people who are at school and how we get that. I had asked some questions about the habilitation skills in the first panel, which I will do, but I wanted to start with Dr Cameron's evidence. Dr Cameron, you finished with the sentence in the last paragraph. What we need is a system for gathering data on the achievements of deaf pupils. I was wondering what that system would look like and what do you believe the achievements would be? I feel that the achievements in Scotland would be woefully bad and inadequate. I think that's what the picture would be. I had to go to England myself to get a decent education, so I had to travel from Scotland and I had to go down there. When you talk about that system, what we need to do is take in the whole picture, not just the child's understanding of a subject. You talk about confidence, habilitation skills, independent skills and all that stuff that we see in the curriculum for excellence. It's simply not happening for deaf children. We have some isolated individual success stories, but it's by no means predictive. Often what we see is in that situation that there has been extra payments made either by the family or the school or somewhere to get extra communication support for that child. It comes down to money. If it was a hearing child not receiving the same standard of education as they appear, parents would be outraged, but we seemed to find it acceptable for deaf children. That's the number of the question. To what extent habilitation skills have been provided across the country, do we know that? Has anyone got an idea of who is doing more if it is in mainstream schools, independent schools or special schools? Have we got any idea across the country as to what is happening? I suppose in my job I am lucky that I am able to visit a lot of schools and do placement visits and read placement files, so in some way I have got an idea. I'm not saying it's a complete picture. There are many really good things happening in supporting. We don't usually use the term habilitation in deaf education, but I know what you mean in visual impairment terms. In terms of deaf education, I suppose independence, resilience and confidence. I think that the NDCS has done some very good work in this area. When I look at children who are coming to events, for example, which sometimes have events at the Scottish Century Centre for Pupils, the places where there is a resource base school, I see much more confidence. I see in some areas of Scotland deaf studies being a subject in itself, and I don't mean just big D deaf studies only focusing on sign language, but talking about the experience of being deaf and having the chance to reflect on that experience and seeing yourself as a potential deaf adult who is likely to sometimes want to use signs and sometimes want to use speech in different circumstances, understanding the situation of deaf people and understanding what they need to do to make hearing people work better with them. That sort of self-confidence assertiveness training is done in some places and you can see the results when you get groups of deaf children together. I must say that Folkirk is one of those places where I've seen deaf students being very confident and talk out and be aware about who they are. You've got deaf adults in that school, haven't you? I think that the proof is in the pudding there. I think that that helps a great deal because a lot of deaf children amazingly think that they're going to become hearing when they grow up.  We have a deaf sign language tutor, but we often have lots of our former pupils coming back and talking to the children and being involved with what they're doing. Anytime we have a deaf adult in the school, we always invite them down right to the primary classes to make sure that they're aware. We do surveys with the very young primary children asking, are you deaf or are you hearing? What do you think that person is? Are they deaf or are you hearing? How do they communicate? Do they wear hearing aids? It's a much more natural environment. The children that come back praise the education that they've had in Windsor Park because we care very much about each individual child's needs and try to address those needs as best we can. What we're seeing here is a clear need for an environment where a deaf-friendly environment, a signing environment, is not an environment that isolates the child. Dr Cameron, you made a comment that echoed what Dominic Everett said in the previous panel about the scope within curriculum for excellence to address some of those things. His concern was then that there wasn't space and capacity within the system to allow some of the habilitation to take place. I wonder if similar issues arise in relation to the independence and resilience that you were talking about, Rachel. We got on to a discussion about whether or not the presumption of mainstreaming was actually the way in which it was implemented and interpreted was actually working against the interests of, in the previous discussion, those with sight impairments and whether there's a similar issue in relation to those with hearing impairment. I think you'd say that mainstreaming isn't working at all in that regard. You can see why wanting to include deaf people in society sounds like a great thing. It doesn't sound like a bad thing at all in theory, but the actual experiences that are becoming more isolated are more vulnerable in the mainstream than they ever have been before. Teachers of the deaf might be able to visit once a week, in some cases once a month, an hour a day. What are the kids doing the rest of the time in school? What's happening all the other hours? If you've got a deaf resource centre based within a larger school where you've got that critical mass to enable confidence independence, I think that we can get through all of the curriculum for excellence. There shouldn't be any barriers to learning if we provide the right learning environment. I've met deaf people who know a number of languages. There's no reason that deaf people can't even learn French, Japanese, physics, any subject. If the language base is there, if the education is accessible, then they can achieve on a par with their hearing peers. To drop them in the mainstream with no support or inadequate support is shameful. One doesn't like to think about the mental health implications that must arise from the anxiety that these young people must feel going through that experience. Deafness is not a learning disability, and that's an important point to bear in mind. I mean, I was going to say that the visit to winter park school was evidence that, where it works, it can work extremely well. Therefore, I suppose the question is, does that give us confidence that we should be able to make that work across the piece, perhaps by concentrating resource in some respects? Or will we need to tailor things in an urban setting compared to a rural setting? I mean, I had a previous panel talk about the lack of provision at all in my constituency in Orkney, and that comes as no surprise to me. Recruitment can present real difficulties in some rural areas. Is there a danger that we try to fix this with a one-size-fits-all and end up coming up with solutions that really aren't going to work in different parts of the country? I'm really glad that you asked that question. I caught it on the monitor downstairs, as you were asking it to the previous panel. I think that the standards in Scotland schools leading to the presumption of mainstreaming does some deaf children a real disservice because of the fact that they can risk falling into this category of language. Also, as Audrey explained very clearly about mental health implications of being different, isolated and not involved in the classroom. The research that we did suggested that it would benefit local authorities if they co-operated and set up resource-based schools where you have a peer group. That can work for children who sign as well as children who use speech. DL High School is a very good example of a successful resource-based school where children achieve. If you notice that DL is in the top 50 secondary schools for Scotland, according to the Herald's league table, and it's got more than you'd expect of children from deprived backgrounds, then the success rate is good. Having a mass of children, I mean I don't necessarily think that it's good that DL only uses speech because I can't see nowadays why we need to just have that approach, but the fact is that it's an achieving school, it's a school where parents want their children to go. Parents of deaf children are very happy when their children get into DL. They achieve well. Resource-based schools are a good idea. Obviously, it's easier to work out in central Belden than in the rest of Scotland, but rural authorities could collaborate and did, in the past, collaborate. For example, Aberdeenshire used to send children into Aberdeen city where they have a school. They don't anymore. That's where you have a risk, I think, and it's perfectly possible for those local authorities to collaborate more. We have to consider, as part of that, boarding schools. Children still go to a school, Mary Hare, notably in England, where they go to very successfully. Usually, they go home at the weekend, but some people find it heartbreaking in today's context to being away from your parents, but I'm grateful to my parents for taking that brave step and providing me with the education that I required. If they hadn't done that at the time and hadn't made that move, I certainly wouldn't have got my doctorate and I wouldn't be sitting here in front of you. Perhaps the Harry Potter books have made boarding more attractive to 21st century pens. I don't know, but that's what my experience is like. That's what my school is like, being at Hogwarts. Exactly where I'll deaf. It's still magical. I thank the panel for coming along this morning and giving up your time to come and speak to us and give us your evidence. It's been very helpful. This is obviously the start of a short inquiry into sensory impairment to go along with the bigger inquiry on attainment that we're doing. I also think that it fits very well into some of the work that we've done with Mark Griffin's bill on BSL. Once again, I thank Andy Carmichael very much for all his efforts. It's through him that we can do this so well. Thank you.


Baby ignore not make bed. Guess what time it is It's that time you ready no, I'm not ready.   Yes, and I've never done anything like this before so we're gonna be this Dummy, I've never wax your legs before. I've never waxed never. Why are we doing me first? Because I can't do and I don't grow hair enough to do you have to have it nervous But now I'm nervous and it's gonna be good for you though because you won't have to shave for like two to three weeks You might really enjoy this because you're literally ripping the hair follicle. I know out of my mind You know what this might be really good for you. So you don't have to shave as much All right, baby, so start stripping down get prepared. Make sure your hair isn't too long We're not to trim it a little bit. So you ready? I don't have any other choice. So yes I am ready. So the wax strips that I got was nair. I know like nair is like really good for like wax stuff.  Is this nair or is this actual wax strips? Hold on honey I've you see these wax ready strips legs and body. Okay, three important tips now three This video is per idea by the way Listen we have to prepare before you begin to listen carefully three important tips Appropriate hair length hair should be no longer than a half trim a test series. So check your hair and make sure that We're good, okay Skin preparation skin should be clean and dry Oh my god oils creams and Prespirations wash skin with soap and water and dry through the four waxing. You already showered. So you're fine. We're good Hatch test you can do a patch test to apply a test strip to small area Doing it so we're not gonna wait. I know she's a literally been working out for this for the past This is what you've been working out for isn't it to rip my hair off So it says for bikini which we're gonna be doing on you it says to use a powder part waxing We don't have powder and I know what do you mean? What do you wait? Whoa? Whoa? Use a powder before I think we get powder. I didn't know we needed to get powder. It's okay It's okay for it says for best results. It doesn't say we need it for I want the best result I don't want to like half-ass this apply the direction of hair growth and remove in the opposite direction Oh my god with the free hand is very important. It's air to avoid bruising. Oh Okay, let's do it.  You talking about it is obviously making it worse So let's just do it right now. I just want to get it over with and we're gonna do it right here right now Actually, you know what Bill?  These wax strips look really nice. Okay Waxing white post waxing white. What does that mean after post is after a post or before pre is before Okay, so you can you know wipe it down get all nice and airy You know it's like post notifications. Make sure to turn on your post notifications Yeah, guys after we post you'll get notified. I didn't say hi to you guys. What is up Marvel squad?  Like it just it scares me today. I'm sorry for me Okay, I need my anger What see why do you have a face up like that? This is not a bully Billy day. Okay, Bob is fun. I hope you guys enjoy this video before we start I'm doing this for your peer entertainment. Mmm. They did it's it's wax babe.  Make sure to give this video a thumbs up if this video gets 5,000 likes we're gonna get Mariah to do some wax strips Okay, we will get Mariah to grow up her arm hair her leg hair whatever it is and we are gonna wax this girl because I am done being the test on me So please give it a thumbs up if you want to see this girl. I mean like go through the same pain as I do I mean like five thousand five. Oh my god. Easy. I could have said five hundred. I can switch to five hundred All right, baby, it's waxing time. Welcome to my final resting place Marvel squad It's crazy because I never thought I would be giving you a wax, you know, thank you for my hair.  Yeah. I'm like, are you supposed to rub it? She's like, well, I don't know like What is the instruction? No, the instructions literally said no need to prior rub No, it says no need to which means don't warm that This is like awkward is it oh I'm scared I'm so scared Like shut up They're down This is perfect pull it down. This is perfect I know I need to have a clear thing to lay this note pull your pants freaking down.  No All right, give me a towel. Oh, you're fine.   Oh my god Yes Yo, I just want you all to know I love you guys And I am going to try to keep a straight face throughout this whole process.  Oh, it is sticky Oh my god, can we do a test one? Can we do it? Can we do a test one on? I don't know. A little strip. That's so big. Okay. Just do it. Just do it. Across the whole full. Oh, which way is your hair going? Ow! Why would you stick it on? Baby, just remember remember once it's on it's on. All right, I'm seeing where your hair is going. Just do it right here. Hold on baby. I have to make sure I'm doing this right. Can you just chill and like relax a little bit guy? You're not the one getting waxed. What are you talking about? I'm doing the direction of hair, girl. Which is usually toward the inside of the thighs. Apply in the direction of the hair drill. Yes, apply and then rip it off opposite direction. Okay. No, do it up here first. Honey. Do this first. All right It's cold. Oh my god. You have to do it like this. You gotta stick it out there so you can pull it out. Are you ready? No, I'm not. I'm not at all. Are you ready? No, I just said no. All right, I'm gonna keep a straight face. I'm nervous for you. Oh my god. Oh my god. I gotta make sure it's stuck on my hair. Mariah, I swear to God, you better rip this off in one pull. Ready? Three, two, three, two. The hair's literally staining. I'm gonna stick it. I'm gonna stick it for a bit. I can't. I think I've promised you this was like it's bad. Really? It's bad. Let me do another. Let me do like a deeper strip. No, not a deeper strip. Oh It's sticky. Yeah, I know why it's why you wipe it down after. All right, let me do it over here. Oh my, oh no. I promise you, I am not a wuss, but this is so unnecessary for whoever gets waxing. It's so unnecessary. Well, usually they have better like, like, like they'll wax out. Yeah, we're literally using store-bought like, non-professional. Yeah, non-professional. Oh my god. So I gotta rip this way now. No, you don't. Yes you do, because the hair's going that way. I can't rip it that way. I have to rip it this way. Oh my god. Do you want to go on this side? Yeah. Dude, that hurt. That really hurt. Yes. Okay, here we go. Oh my god, I'm so sorry. It hurts! I told you. Oh, shoot. I'm literally bleeding. Does it say you're supposed to bleed other directions? Dude, I don't know. Probably not. Probably not. Well, that means it's not good for your skin, maybe. Right, you are literally ripping out hundreds of hairs. It is not good for your skin. Oh my god. Why isn't it? That hurts so bad. I don't think it's supposed to be. It's so bad. Where do I wax?  Post-waxing wipes? Is there another one? We get it wet. Here, try this one. Yeah, it's not supposed to be super wet. It's like a chemical on it or something. Does it help get it off? The stickiness? Probably. Dude, my skin is so red. My skin literally looks like a cherry. Should we just do a strip on your leg? No! No, because I look un-proportional. And do I know what the sad part is? Only like 20% of the hair actually came out. All the rest literally stays on there. Let me show you guys. A good amount came out. Okay, that's TMI, bro. That's so TMI. That is not TMI. It's like shaving your arm. You're pulling your under arm. In my defense, this is like kind of by my belly area. It is more by your belly area. Yeah, I didn't want to like try to go all the way in. Babe, it's a literally beet red. You see that? Yeah. Do you show me like an upper leg hair? Ooh, because why would I want to do that? No, hand is more than a half inch. No, that is dangerous. That is so dangerous. Hang on, let me wash my hand first. Do not try this at home. I promise you. That's hurt? It's not bad, but in a moment it hurt. Yeah, now it's just like sore. Yeah, it feels like I just got like slapped. Like someone just like slapped my skin. Okay, did it actually hurt really bad? I need to show you guys, because you need to see, like I am not lying right now, legit. This is not going to be anything nasty, no blood or anything. This is literally like by my stomach. Ow, hold up. All right. Can you see? Can you see how red that is? It's like at the bottom of my stomach. You won't do that on me? It's hard to see. It gets worse. It gets worse the more you go down, but obviously I'm not going to show it to you guys. I am done. No, I am tapping out. We literally did one. One of these, it comes with two. Don't rip it off. Why? You're ripping apart? Do you want to use it? No, I already showed them what it looks like. I already ripped it off on camera. This is literally all we used. Yeah. Is this much? That? I do not recommend for anyone to go through ever. You think that's funny, don't you? I thought that was pretty freaking funny. Do you want to know 5,000 likes? No baby, I don't have hair to be pulling like that. Dude, imagine. I really don't. Imagine. Funny. Dude, imagine. No, that would be so bad. Oh my God. God, that would hurt so bad. Wait, baby's on. No, it's not. Right, it's on. No, I'm not even kidding. Babe. Babe, get the wipes. Get the wipes. Babe, it's not funny. Please. Babe, get the wipes. Get the wipes. It's on. It's literally stuck. Babe. If it was stuck, would it be holding on? It's not. It hurts. Mariah, help. Help. Please take it off. Please. Please. I can't. I can't breathe. Okay. What do you rate waxing? 1 out of 10. 1 out of 10? Boy, like 10 being the best. 10 being the worst. 10 being the 10. 10. Yes. 10. I promise. I am not a wuss, okay? I know you're not a wuss. Okay, maybe I am a little bit, which I really don't care. That's who I am. This hurts. This literally hurts. Like, it is scary. And I was, I was like, all right. No, it can't be that bad. No, waxing is scary. So props to whoever can go through that because I literally care. Well, luckily, you had here to actually wax on it. So I don't have here to wax on like that. I know. It was perfect. Yeah. That would have. You know what next company you're going to do? You actually get like the wax like melts where you melt it and you lay it out. They're not going to do that. See, I feel like that one's better because it gets around the hair. Yeah. The reason it hurt is because not only did Mariah go.  I knew it wasn't all the way off. So she had to do it again. But half of the hair stayed in my skin. So it just like got tugged and then. It'll stop. I'm gross. Mama's gone. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Make sure to give this a thumbs up for me. I literally will never do this again in my life. Write all those out now.  I really do. Whoever does get this done like props to you because I could not do it. I literally could not. I've never gotten wax before in my life. Well, not yet. I'm not getting waxed. Okay. Anyways guys, we'll see you in a month. I might just mess around and stick one of these on your leg when you're sleeping. Stop. Don't. I don't have hair for that right now. Once it's on, you can't take it off. But I hope you guys have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much for watching this video. We are on the road to three million. Three million Mama Squad YouTube subscribers. Thank you so much for all the support across our whole channel. We literally appreciate you. I know we say it enough, but I just want you guys to know we love you so much. We would not be here without you guys. Thank you, baby. Thank you. We will see you in the next video. But until then, peace. Love you guys.


Two weeks ago, we had already tripled our aid to Gaza. Today, I can announce that we are further increasing the humanitarian aid to Gaza by another 25 million euros. By doing so, the European Union would spend a total of 100 million euros in humanitarian aid for the civilians in Gaza. And at the same time, we are working with Israel, Egypt and the United Nations to let more convoys into Gaza, including through corridors and pauses for humanitarian needs. Aid is now entering through the Rafa border crossing, but the volumes remain too small to match the massive humanitarian needs in Gaza. Our priority is to work with partners to reinforce Rafa's logistic capacities, and at the same time, we are working on complementary routes. A maritime corridor from Cyprus, for example, that would guarantee a sustained, regulated and robust flow of aid. And I very much welcome the excellent cooperation with President Nikos Christodolidis and his government. Our union is the largest humanitarian donor to Gaza, and we will keep pushing for our aid to reach civilians in need. This can make the difference between life and death for thousands of Palestinians. Supporting Israel is essential, and aiding civilians in Gaza is essential too. The humanitarian situation is dire. The death toll and the suffering of Palestinian civilians is tragic. And as policymakers, we face a dreadful dilemma. Israel has the right to defend itself, while Hamas bunkers, hides fighters and stores weapons, below refugee camps and civilian infrastructure. Hamas is clearly using innocent Palestinians and hostages as human shields. It is horrific, and it is pure evil, and our hearts bleed at the images of small children pulled out from under the rubble. All of us, as democracies and as human beings, have a responsibility to do everything possible to protect civilians who are caught in harm's way. So while Israel has the right to fight Hamas, it is also essential that it strives to avoid civilian casualties and to be as targeted as possible. Because every human life matters, be it Israeli or Palestinian.


Minister of Transportation Rotimiamechi says President Mohamed Buhari will inaugurate the construction of the Kanwukidu Nareel project in the next few weeks. The minister who was speaking at the weekly presidential media briefing, organized by the State House Media Unit, said already all contracts for the project had been awarded, while the loan for the project was not forthcoming from China as earlier planned. He said the project would now be funded from the Ministry budgetary allocation, as the federal government would not continue to wait endlessly for the loan. According to him, the federal government has already paid $218 million for the contractors, saying additional $100 million will be paid to them and making it $318 million.


So in today's video I'm going to try to attempt a challenge to see how I would have solved this on my own. One of the viewers asks about a custom post type of a course and says, can I make two post types that are related? One of course and another of lessons and I could complicate it a little bit by adding modules and there are two ways of looking at this. So let me go inside my WordPress. Now WordPress offers us something that's called custom post types and if I wasn't going to do something that's very complex in terms of something like a management system where you can use things like land dash or lifter elements I could simply go for a custom post type and then maybe I would add in some custom taxonomies for me to do that and what I mean simply is let's say if I come to posts here posts but you couldn't make your own post and which is a custom post type and you could have taxonomies where you have something like these categories right here. So let me try to jump into code so that I can show you what exactly mean. So inside my root folder of my website I'm going to go to wp content I'll go into the plugins and inside here I'm going to create a new folder which I'll call custom lms and I'm going to drag and drop this into my editor and inside my editor I'll start by adding the custom dash lms file and this is a PHP because we're going to write it for WordPress and WordPress mainly works with PHP on the server side I'll start with PHP here and then I'll start off with my start plugin this is a code snippet I always add when I want to start plugins license I'll give it up a gpl I'll give it a custom plugin name and I'll call it a custom lms and then I'll change the links put in my domain I'll plugin author I'll just put my brand name here and then I'll say custom lms or simple custom lms simple custom lms I'll just change the name of this right here as well and then everything else here will just be simple custom dash lms now first thing is I'll add some simple security by saying is defined we're going to find out if the app's path is actually defined and this can only be found inside WordPress and if someone tries to access this particular file of yours by hitting let's say the domain URL and try to get to this file to run its code it will not allow them so you're simply saying that decision needs to come from WordPress to run this plugin and not from an outside code that will help us get to this level now the first thing I'm going to do is add a custom post type and the custom post type I'm going to be adding is for courses so it's called courses now inside here I'll add a custom taxonomy I'll add a custom taxonomy called module and then finally inside those individual posts as well create the different lessons so this is quite easy I'll just come here and google this and so I'll say custom post type say custom post type WordPress codex and you'll see we have this function of register post type that we have to use now let me go and just pick the sample code and we have this method of WordPress which is called register post type where we pass in the post type and a couple of array items now these parameters that go in the array are the labels the public the description making it hierarchical can exclude from such we can make it publicly queryable we can show it in the UI in the menu and all these other things and even showing it in the rest API right here that will allow us to use things like Gutenberg if we want to and then just adding capability do we want this to only be for the administrators or should subscribers and other people be seeing this so there's so many options that you can choose from here to write your custom post type but what I'm going to do here on this page is scroll all the way down so that I can see just a sample usage of this particular post type so I'll copy this code it's a mang one of the highly recognized comments come back here in my code and I'll paste it then I'll just run through for you what's going on so on the add action we are using the init hook so that when wordpress is initialized we run this function that actually starts from here now remember we talked about having the register post type function running here so in here we're running a post type of recipe which I am going to change for all these different times it appears I'm going to change the word recipe and I'm going to call that course so that I'm registering a number of courses and then in the arguments I'm going to pass in this number of arguments so I pass in the labels which labels is also a value that we've stated here so we have that name the name of the courses which is courses we have the singular name for course the menu name will be courses we'll add it to that mean bar to add course we'll add the add new add new item editing and all the different things down here that we need so I'll save this come back to my admin side I'll reload here and you'll see that our plugin is available and then I'll click activate when I activate it you'll see that we have here courses showing up and we're able to add a new course if we want to so I'm going to call this English so I'll call this course English now the reason I can use it in Gutenberg is because I added it to show in rest now if I want to use only the old editor or the classic editor on this I need to show in rest as false instead of true so I'll save this as false come back here reload and you're going to see that we have the old editor just showing up because we've denied it to be shown in rest and that's the way Gutenberg works it works with the rest API so I'll go back to my code here and I'm only going to support let's say the editor the author I'll allow a thumbnail so that we can have a picture at the end of the day so if there are these options that you have to look into and we usually get the basic of this so it's not hierarchical we're giving it a position of 20 we're giving it supports and we're going to create our own custom taxonomy so I'm going to remove this category and post tag and we shall create our own custom taxonomy showing up here so you see right here we're having categories showing up so when I reload here we don't have category showing up anymore so we're going to create our own category which we shall call modules so I can come back here and then scroll all the way up I just need to find the search and I'm going to say look for custom taxonomy hit enter and you will see that we also have another function called register taxonomy now when register the taxonomy here it will ask for the taxonomy name and then we'll have other arguments that we're passing for example we want to have an object type we want it to be of an array or do we want it to just be a string then we add particular variables like the label the description should it be publicly queryable should we show it in the UI should we show it in the rest we are doing all these things and adding them so I'll just scroll again down and then we're going to look for an implementation like what we have here and this is sort of going to help so I'm going to copy this come here and paste it and we have two taxonomies that are being registered so what I'm going to do is just remove one of these so we use the init hook again of wordpress to run this function and we give it a priority of zero so that it fires really early now when we come to the function that we are calling right here in the hook we see that we have labels and these labels are name like genre singular is genre we add text for when it's going to be searched and all of these things then we add a menu name and then we add whether it should be hierarchical we add whether it should have labels should it show in the UI should we have an admin column for this should we rewrite it and we are going to rewrite it with a slag of genre but I don't want to have this as genre remember we say we're going to have module in its place so I'll change this to module but we want this to show in a particular post type and the post type we want this to show up in is actually the post that post type that we made here so the post type we want to have here is course so I'll copy what we have here as course and change it for book so we have registered a new module we want it to be part of the course and we've run its different argument so let me save this come back to our backend I'm going to reload here and you will see that we have modules showing up here now of course we can change this it's not looking so nice in our menu and we're going to call it course module I'll change this to uppercase and I'll change all these other ones module right here change this to uppercase so that we have it proper and looking nice I'll save this come back here reload and you will see that we have course module here and when I click on it I am now able to add new modules for example I can say our course is going to be English and the module I'm talking about is comprehension so that's the module work I'll save this as a module I'll come back to my courses here and I'm going to go into the English course and you're going to see that we have a module showing up right here so when I click on this and hit update you're going to see that I can classify this particular course with its module and that's as far deep as possible as I can go I cannot write individual lessons to it but we can look at this in the reverse so let's say if I created another taxonomy and that taxonomy I am going to call it courses and then I'll change my post type to be a lesson so we are sort of reversing the outlook of everything so let me go back into our code we're going to change this course into lesson and then we're going to change our custom post type from courses to lesson so let me look for course I'm going to change that to lesson we'll allow modules to be in there and then I'm going to also duplicate this same thing here I'll have to unset levels because I've used it up and I don't want it to become a problem again down here I'll also unset the args because I'm using it down here again so args so I'll unset those two in the second place where we're using module I'll change this to course make this lowercase c lowercase c save this come back here I'll reload and we're going to see that this is broken because we no longer have that post type and I'll hit my dashboard here and you're going to see we have lessons and inside lessons we have lesson module and we have lesson course now whenever we add a new lesson let's say we're going to call this lesson one we can add a module it's going to be in comprehension and the course is going to be English so when we save this we can be able to query this by course then by module and then by lesson so we can query this on the front end or on the rest api coming from it backwards so we start from course and say let's get all the courses coming in let's get all the modules and then let's get all the lessons that are as per each individual taxonomy there is another way of doing this and that's by using a plugin called advanced custom field now advanced custom fields written by eliot kondon is one of the most powerful plugins there and it has over one million installs i'm going to just install it and i'm going to show you a couple of things about it that are just really really advanced and super so i'll activate the plugin now and once i have it in here i'm going to deactivate the simple custom lms for now let's see what's happening in here so we have a new menu item here which is called custom fields and in here we can add a new field and this field can be called custom lms fields now it can be tied to a particular post type if that's what you want to do to have that and what we're going to do is we are going to go back to our custom lms plugin and we are going to do something different for now so i'm going to go back to my plugins still i'll activate custom simple lms and instead of lessons in here i'm going to comment out everything and just create new posts so i'll copy this code that helps us to make new posts and i'm going to comment out everything else so save this so there is no code that's active i'm just going to create some new post types and for example this post type that i have here of lessons i'll have that which is okay i'm going to create another post type i'll need to change this name and then i'll call this create modules modules cpt i'm also going to change what we have here and i'm going to create some other cpt for a custom post type which i'll i'll just go for this let me change this from modules to pt look for the one down make sure i'm changing this and calling this lessons cpt so i'll save this come back and change what i need to change here so we have this cpt right here which we are going to call courses create underscore courses cpt so i'll change this lessons into courses i'll change every instance that we have here of lesson so we're going to have the first one and it's going to be courses courses which is okay the next one that we'll have is going to be modules so we need to change this lesson into modules so we have our courses up here need to change this so we have our courses up here we then have down here modules and then after that we have our lessons here so let me save this come back to that main area reload and you're going to see we have courses we have modules we have lessons these are all different items that we can use now in the individual custom fields i'm going to just publish this and then so that we can be able to now see our new modules courses and lessons showing up here so i'm going to type particular fields to the individual post types okay so in the post type of our lessons i'm going to add a couple of fields so in here we can have the teacher's name and we have that that will be a text it will be required update that and when we go back to our lessons so i'm going to come to lessons and when you look at lesson one it already has teachers right here so what i'm going to do is try to attach the different modules and courses into this lesson so i'll go back to the fields i'm going to go back to custom fields click edit and i'm going to add the connection between the module and the different lessons so in here the field that i want is going to be relational and it's going to be a relationship so in this relationship i want it to be required and i want it to be filtered by one particular post type and which is modules so i will allow the filters of such post type and taxonomy so i don't need taxonomy i remove the post type because it's only going to be for one post type which is modules so what i will do here is finish this all up and hit update now when i come back to one lesson go back to the lesson here you will see that we have teachers and then we can set this in a particular module now the reason this is empty is because we don't have modules as yet so let me create some dummy modules i'll create this as comprehension click publish add a new one i'll call this a composition publish and then i'll also come to courses and i'm going to create a new course which i'll call English so click save now whenever we're making lessons here we can come to our lesson we add the teacher the teacher is going to be take a press and then we can add the module and our module is going to be composition we can also add comprehension if we want but we don't want this to be part of both modules so i'll just leave on the one module here so i'll click this minus to remove that and then the other thing that i want to do is add a particular course to this so i'll hit update here so that we don't lose that data i'll come back to my fields come back to this and then i'm going to create a course so that we know each lesson is attached to a module and that module is probably attached to a course or i can do the reverse so course and i'll say course is that it's going to be relational in nature it's going to be a relationship i'll require it and the post type this should go is to courses i'll remove the taxonomy because i don't need that and the post type and i'm going to come here and update so when we go back to our lessons here and get our lesson one we can attach our lesson one to the composition module and we can attach it to the English module so when i save this i can be able to query the different lessons and then categorize them basing on the different fields that i've added here so we can now query for this lesson and we are sure that it will have the module and it will have the course added to it so this is how i would probably do it i'm sure that it's working fine using a plugin like advanced custom fields to determine that all my points of information are actually showing up compared to using a taxonomy and the reason is sef would allow me to add boxes like this of information to each individual post type so with courses i can add different details of metadata just like with the modules and just like with the lessons itself here so with even with this lesson i can add a field so if i come back here to fields and then go to i want to edit this lms field so i'm going to change this to lesson fields so that it's very clear i'm going to add a field here which i'm going to call document so it may be this document is something that i want to upload work so i want to upload a document so i can come here choose a different type and in here i want to have upload and i'll choose file here so that it will allow me to upload a file and what i want to do is return a file url not just an array maybe i want to get the array or file url whatever it is and i'll add it to upload it to post and then i can add here limit for the file sizes minimum to zero and then maximum to 300 mb and then i'll come update this document and when i come back to my lessons here i'm able to look down all the way and i can add a document from anywhere my computer or wherever and it is working fine so this would be a better option for me to just use scf to create my own learning management system and give it the different fields that i need to do that