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Elmfield House / Elmfield School for Deaf Children, Greystoke Avenue, Westbury-on-Trym, Bristol, BS10 6AY (03/11/1947 – today)
In 1947, education for Bristol’s Deaf children moved to Elmfield House in Westbury-on-Trym, where Deaf education continues today. Like Ledbury Park, the wartime school, Elmfield is a large old country house with large grounds, although it had to be altered to make it suitable as a school, and has seen many additions in the last 60-plus years. When the school opened, there were around 60 pupils and six staff; the staff included Miss Sharwood, from Ledbury and Shirehampton, and Arthur Glass, a teacher from the earlier days at Kingsdown and Carlton Park Schools.
Before Sharwood retired in 1959, she helped introduce a system of early assessment of hearing in Bristol’s children, and assisted in the setting up, and taught at, the Bristol Hearing Assessment Clinic from 1954. The advances in audiological testing offered by the Clinic gradually saw an increase in the number of children taught in partially hearing schools, and a decrease in the number taught in special Deaf schools.
Sharwood also brought in new technology to Elmfield School, introducing Medresco hearing aids, and later (1955) extending the auditory training room to accommodate a modern group-aid system. In 1958, group hearing-aids were added to all classrooms, and as technology progressed in the 1960s with magnetic ‘loop’ systems, an Induction Loop Pick-up System was eventually fitted throughout the school.