About BATOD Midland

BATOD Midland covers a huge area, including: Birmingham Central, Sandwell, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Dudley, Solihull, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Nottingham and Nottingham City, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Leicester City, Coventry, Telford&Wrekin/Shropshire, Herefordshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucester. The area supports and teaches deaf children in mainstream schools, resource bases and schools for deaf children, providing peripatetic and advisory services. Each area liaises with other professional bodies providing multi-agency support. Additional support is provided by other teams supporting deaf children, for example, the Cochlear Implant teams in Nottingham and Birmingham, and Ewing Foundation, and NDCS based in Birmingham.

Committee Membership: The Midland region committee is made up of Chair (Angie Wootten ), Secretary (Corrina Burge ) and Treasurer (Helen Cooper) Additional committee members are Rianna Sime (Coventry), Jen Linekar (Sandwell) and Hannah Cockburn (Warks). All Midland BATOD members are very welcome to join us.

Midland membership: The region currently has 219 members. Each member is invited to join our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/470734413121510 which is the main way that events and resources are communicated.

Representation on National Executive Council (NEC):  The NEC meets four times a year. At the present time we have no NEC Representative. The NEC calls upon members to contribute to various Government papers and is involved in high level representation in many different areas on behalf of Teachers of the Deaf.

Conferences and Twilight meetings in the Midland region: In recent years we have held Twilight events exploring deaf children and literacy (2017 in Leicestershire), deaf children and resilience (2018 in Coventry) and giving deaf children access to Shakespeare (2019 in Warks). The pandemic saw us taking a different approach via Zoom and in November 2020 we co-hosted a webinar celebration of 40 years of paediatric cochlear implantation. This has given us the impetus to offer other ‘get togethers’ online e.g. a post-16 coffee morning and we have plans for a regular early years online event, as well as an event sharing ideas about ALDs used in the home. We use our Facebook presence to share resources, news and research.