In November 2015, MOOV at BT Sport had a young talented man start with them. His name is Kevin Walker and he is a graphic designer. He was put to MOOV by Channel 4 as he was brilliant at his role. Duncan (the managing director) was worried about the communication barrier as he had not worked with a Deaf person before. Kevin is profoundly deaf and uses sign language, whereas Duncan and his company had no signing skills at all.
Duncan heard of our Company VSP and was extremely interested to discuss our plans. At VSP we understand at the workplace hours are very precious and training cannot take up much time. But here at VSP we understand that and are very flexible, we offer anything from 1 hour lessons to 8 hours. At the interview, we also met with Kevin, who was very impressed with what we do here at VSP and was delighted that work colleagues wanted to be able to communicate with him more.
At the first lesson, I Constantina, (CEO of VSP) delivered an hour of deaf awareness which really opened the eyes of all the delegates and made them understand a little of what it’s like to be deaf. The group found this session very interesting.
I was the tutor responsible for delivering the course and am a highly-experienced teacher of many years. I was supported by Sarah, my communications support worker. There were seven students on the course.
All the way through the training which took four weeks at 2 hours per session, we always made sure we kept good communication with Kevin to make sure he was happy and was comfortable communicating with his work friends. He noticed that their confidence was growing using sign language which was nice for him to see.
On our last training session Sarah and I felt we really started to get to know our students well and appreciated greatly what they were doing for Kevin, we were sad that it had to come to an end. After our final session, we had a brief meeting with Duncan to ask how he thought it went and what he would like to happen next and he was totally happy with the service and wanted to book another block of 10 hours training. When we asked him why did he want more Duncan’s answer was “Because I want to be able to communicate even more with Kevin”.
We are so proud of the work we have done with MOOV and look forward to working with them more this year.
Thank you MOOV
