It is also an advocate for legislation regarding hearing screening for newborns and runs two highly successful outreach programmes in previously disadvantages areas.

On Thursday, 23 May, an official celebration will take place at the Centre to celebrate this important milestone. In attendance will be Donald Grant, minister of Education in the Western Cape; representatives of the Western Cape Department of Education; as well as the first two teacher employed at the Centre in 1973; several ex-pupils, which include the current Miss Deaf Africa; as well as sponsors, donors and past staff members.

Forty years ago the ENT specialist Prof Carel du Toit had a vision of teaching deaf children to speak, by offering them oral education. At the time this was a revolutionary idea. In 1971 he started a programme that fulfilled this dream. Today his legacy is alive and well at the Carel du Toit Centre for Hearing Impaired Children.

This unique Centre has a wide field of expertise – it offers onsite therapies and support programmes to deaf children and their families, consults other educational facilities and presents conferences on the latest trends in deaf education. The Carel du Toit Centre follows a mainstream curriculum and prepares deaf learners to join mainstream education from Grade 3. The school consists of a pre-school (age 3 to Grade R) and Foundation Phase (Grade 1-3).

Learners can benefit from the fundamental and essential therapies they need at the Centre, including speech therapy, occupational and physiotherapy. An audiologist provides the most important service to the learners – keeping their hearing aids in working order, monitoring their hearing, and seeing to it that they are fitted with the best possible hearing aids for their specific hearing needs.

An integral part of the Centre is the unique Parent Guidance programme which supports deaf children and their families from the moment of diagnoses. This can include hearing impaired children from the age of two weeks.

The Carel du Toit Centre is committed to getting newborn screening legislated in the Western Cape. If a child is diagnosed with hearing impairment after the age of 2, it becomes increasingly difficult for the child to learn speech and language.

A baby can be fitted with a hearing aid or receive a cochlear implant from as early as six months. It is important that sound stimulation reaches the brain at the time that the brain is programmed to learn language. According to research this is during first three years of life. After that the efficiency lessens until by age 7. Thereafter if the brain has never been stimulated by sound, it will no longer be capable of learning language. This is an irreversible process.

A baby of 24 hours can be screened for deafness – this is a non-invasive and pain free procedure. Unfortunately, newborn screening for deafness is not legislated in South Africa and many children are diagnosed too late.

In 2002, the Carel du Toit Community Outreach Programme was founded when a hearing screening programme was implemented at the Nolungile Clinic in Khayelitsha. Babies are screened for deafness when they come to the clinic for their 6-week vaccination. In partnership with the City of Cape Town Health Department, the Ivan Thoms Infant Hearing Screening Programme was launched in February 2009, using this model of screening in eight metropole clinics.

A newborn screening programme at Maternal Obstetric Units was set up in 2012 in conjunction with the Provincial Department of Health as part of the Ivan Thoms Programme. Currently, screening is implemented at three of the 11 Maternal Obstetric Units in Cape Town – Mitchell’s Plain, Gugulethu and Hanover Park. With the necessary financial backing, this project will be extend to all MOU’s in Cape Town, as well as to all high risk babies in the tertiary hospitals. The latter will necessitate more facilities and capacity building at the Centre.