Deaf Awareness Week

Celebrating Role Models in Education and Employment

Today the Hearing Aid Repair shop are celebrating

‘The remarkable Mary Hare

Mary Hare was born on November 3rd 1865. She was one of a family of ten.

She was a remarkable woman, establishing a Brighton based uniformed women’s police force as well as being an active Suffragette. However, her foremost achievement was as the Founder of an oral school for deaf children which has now become the UK’s largest non-maintained special school for the deaf. Mary Hare’s ethos was that deafness was not a mental disability but rather a sensory impairment that presents the deaf child with additional barriers to learning. At the time this was quite a unique approach. To this day, the school continues to fulfil her vision for the auditory/oral education of deaf children. Mary Hare died in 1945 two days after her 80th birthday. She wrote in her will, ‘my efforts on behalf of the Deaf have been my greatest joy in life.’

Mary Hare School

Miss Hare opened a school for deaf boys and girls in her mother’s house in London in 1883. She went on to establish Dene Hollow Oral School for the Deaf in 1916 taking pupils from all over the world. In commemoration of its Founder, the school was renamed the Mary Hare Grammar School on 1 January 1946. In 1949 Mary Hare School moved to its current home at Arlington Manor, Newbury. (more…)