The work of my colleague Jacqueline Stokes, who has died of cancer aged 61, enabled hundreds of hearing-impaired children to learn to listen and talk.
Brought up in Dorset, she studied education at Homerton College, Cambridge, and then taught English in Oxford before enrolling at McGill University, Montreal, in 1980, to train as an auditory verbal therapist under Daniel Ling, a pioneer in educating deaf children in speaking. She became the first auditory verbal therapist to practise in the UK, working at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading for many years. Her approach was to coach parents in skills for developing listening and talking, while using the best amplification available.
Jacqueline was an extraordinary therapist, demonstrating and eliciting speech and listening in infants and children; and effectively transferring these skills to parents so that families could provide a rich experience of sounds, songs and speech for their child. Each session was characterised by laughter and play.
New research has shown what Jacqueline knew intuitively – that the extent of a family's engagement indicates how successfully a child will respond. She was passionate about achieving a good result for all families who chose talking and listening as their child's mode of communication. To promote the auditory verbal approach, Jacqueline established the charity Auditory Verbal UK (AVUK) in 2003.
When the Newborn Hearing Screening Programme was introduced in the NHS in 2006, to identify babies born with permanent hearing loss in the first few weeks of life and fit them with hearing aids, Jacqueline grasped the potential for giving families vital early support. She explained to parents the enormous benefits of early learning offered by the neural plasticity of infancy. She would challenge the mediocre aspirations of other professionals in the field by asking: "But would you be happy with that if it was your child with hearing loss?"
Jacqueline was excited by the advances made in the diagnosis of hearing loss and in support for children. She advocated the continuing training of professionals to ensure that they were able to keep up with progress. For a child who was not receiving the full benefit of hearing technology, she would say: "It is like being given the keys to the car, but not being taught how to drive it."
Jacqueline had clarity of vision, determination and emotional engagement that made her both inspirational and, at times, dauntingly aspirational.
She is survived by three daughters, Alexandra, Madeleine and Francesca, from her marriage to Steve Woolgar.
