We spent the next twenty minutes looking around the school, from the nursery, which took hearing children from the local area as well as deaf children, right up to the secondary. I was given the spiel about their new science lab, as well as shown all of the assistive technology they had for the students.

All the students wear radio aids as well as their hearing aids or cochlear implants. This allows them to hear the teacher more clearly. All our students use BSL, but some of them also use spoken English, so the teachers use both.

Is it usually Sign-Supported English? I asked, referring to when someone would sign and speak at the same time, using BSL signs but in English word order. Liz looked mildly impressed that I knew what I was talking about, and I wanted to give her a gentle reminder that I’d spent my life in the Deaf community and my adulthood working with deaf clients.

That depends on the class. If a teacher has two students who prefer BSL, that’s what they’ll use. If the class prefers a mixture of communication modes, it’s spoken English and SSE. All our teachers are highly experienced and use their own judgement.

We found ourselves walking down towards the hall as the bell went for lunchtime. Flashing lights were set up in each classroom and along the corridor to alert students to the change in lessons. Teenagers started to hurry past us to the hall, which was set up as a canteen. We stood back against the wall to let them past.

I need to supervise students at lunchtime, Liz told me, nodding at the corridor that led back to the meeting room and the entrance hall. Can you find your own way back?

I told her I could, then watched her stride down the corridor, stopping to tell a student off for not wearing his uniform correctly. After a few minutes, I followed her.

Having been to the local state school myself, it felt strange to be in such a small group of students. All twenty-three students could have lunch at the same time and they’d barely fill three of the tables that crowded the dining hall in my old school. I hovered in the doorway to the hall, watching Liz Marcek keeping the line in order. She chatted to every student as she stood there, asking some how their mornings had been, encouraging others to take a piece of fruit with their lunch. That was surely the value in having an environment like this, where the staff could get to know every single pupil and make them feel like an important part of the school community.