First Use of Sign Language in Parliament Helped by Surrey University

Published on: 29 Oct, 2018
Updated on: 31 Oct, 2018

The first use of sign language to deliver a speech in the Houses of Parliament in July was with the essential support of the University of Surrey, it has been revealed.

British Sign Language (BSL) was used by International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt to deliver a speech on the Global Disability Summit co-hosted later in July by the UK and Kenya.

Ms Mordaunt was taught to use sign language for the speech by University of Surrey academic Kathleen Grehan.

In a press release from the university a spokesperson said: “When Penny Mordaunt became the first minister in British history to use sign language from the despatch box in Parliament, it was an extremely proud moment for her BSL tutor Kathleen Grehan who teaches BSL at the University of Surrey’s School of Literature and Languages.”

Grehan was asked by Mordaunt to help her achieve this milestone in deaf awareness on the back of her extremely successful introductory sign language course with the Department for International Development (DFID) for a group of Whitehall staff earlier in the year.

Mordaunt chose to use sign language to highlight the fact that the UK was co-hosting the first ever Global Disability Summit. She opted to speak and sign at the same time so Grehan took great care when structuring each sentence so that the signs fitted with the speech, at the same time as maintaining correct BSL.

There are around 300 different types of sign language used around the world today, and BSL is the most common form of sign language in the UK with its own grammatical structure. After years of campaigning, BSL was finally recognised by the UK government in 2003 as an official minority language which led to increased funding for deaf awareness.

Grehan said: “Penny was an excellent student, working extremely hard in a short space of time to learn the speech. As well as bringing attention to the important work done by the Department for International Development, the news coverage of this Parliamentary “first” highlighted BSL as a language.”

Grehan isn’t the only Surrey academic working to improve deaf awareness. She also taught BSL Level 3 to Surrey’s Professor Richard Bowden in the Centre for Speech and Signal Processing which is now developing a new machine that turns BSL into written English.

According to a 2016 survey conducted by totaljobs, 65% of deaf people believe that technological developments have transformed the workplace for them, so new technology like this will aim to help the deaf community tackle work-based discrimination.