These include a new search facility, a ‘Latest news’ feed, refinements to the navigation menus, new project case studies in the ‘What We’ve Done’ section and a mobile version of the site for people on the go.  The low-graphics mobile site is ideal both for visitors on slow connections (such as dial-up or 2G mobile networks) and for any partially-sighted visitors using screen readers (we have tested it with Thunder and WebbIE and ChromeVox in Chrome, which seemed to work fairly well).

We would welcome feedback to help us improve the site further; if you have any comments or suggestions for the site please do not hesitate to contact us.

Andy studied for the Diploma in 2010-2011, and as well as the ANC prize was awarded a special commendation for achieving Merit grades in all the assessed components.  This is becoming a habit at AJA; Andy Oldridge also received a special commendation for achieving a full set of Merits when studying the Diploma in 2009-2010, and Ian Rees won the Diploma prize for best overall mark in 2005.

Andy was presented his prize by the ANC Chairman, Robert Adnitt, at the IoA Reproduced Sound Conference in Brighton, and our thanks to go to the ANC and IoA for their hospitality.

The cinema is now screening films twice weekly.  Details of all the Atrium facilities, including cinema and theatre show times, can be found on their website at www.nwatrium.org.

We undertook the acoustic design and commissioning of the shell, working with Latvian engineers and fabricators Salons AIS and Russian show designers Show Consulting.  The shell was designed and constructed very rapidly over a period of less than two months.  We flew out to St Petersburg on 30 December to supervise the first installation and take acoustic commissioning measurements to assess the improvements provided by the new shell.  The new shell was installed and commissioned in eight hours overnight on 31 December, in time for the concert that evening.  We have put together a short timelapse video of the installation, which can be viewed at http://youtu.be/Sk2niI9bb2o.

 The concert, which included vocal performances from Indira Mahajan, Ailyn Perez, James Valenti and Sir Willard White, was a great success, playing to a full house.  The orchestra deftly handled the fast pace and frequent time signature changes of Bernstein and Gershwin’s livelier material, suggesting that the shell served its purpose well.  We hope the shell will see increasingly frequent use as the Theatre expands its concert programme.

You can find more information on purchasing CATT-Acoustic or renewing your updates / support here.

We worked closely with the designers, Ingleton Wood, and the contractor, Young’s Homes, throughout the build, and the sound insulation test results were among some of the best we have measured.  Our congratulations to all involved on this well-deserved commendation.

In the first case, a large school which had recently adopted Academy status, we found that while the room acoustics and noise levels in unoccupied classrooms were generally adequate, noise levels during lessons were exceptionally high.  This is of course a function of class size but also of the teaching methods used, where pupils talked constantly throughout the lessons.  This is normal during group learning and practical sessions such as science lab work, but in several cases I was surprised to find that the pupils carried on talking even when teachers were addressing the class, meaning that the teacher had to raise her voice to be heard over the constant babble of conversation, so that the pupils talked more loudly to be heard above the noise of the teacher, and so on… This is a novel form of the Lombard effect which, while making classes pleasantly informal, does rather impair the flow of information from staff to pupil which is supposed to be part of the education process.  More specifically for our client, it meant that a pupil with a cochlear implant would have no chance of making out what the teacher was saying.

The contrast with the parents’ preferred school was quite startling.  This was an independent school with smaller class sizes (anything from 7 to 20 pupils depending on the subject) but the biggest difference was in classroom discipline.  Basically, while the teacher is talking, the pupils shut up.  Very old-fashioned perhaps but ideal for hearing-impaired pupils.  Numerically it meant that noise levels over the duration of a lesson were about 10 dB LAeq lower.  This was interesting in that it showed that the approach to teaching and discipline in a school has as much effect on its suitability for teaching hearing-impaired pupils as the design of the buildings themselves.

We found the same issue in circulation spaces – in the Academy, pupils were expected to wait outside classrooms until the teacher arrived, meaning that corridors rapidly became very crowded and so noisy that I could only converse with someone by shouting.  I measured levels of 79 dB LAeq over 5 minutes in a corridor between lessons, and 83 dB in a covered “outdoor playspace” during lunch.   That would be unbearable for most children with hearing aids or cochlear implants and is, unfortunately, just a function of having a lot of pupils in a relatively small space – in the independent school, which had about half as many pupils and the luxury of a very large site, there was just not the build-up of pupils in any one space for such high noise levels to occur.

In that case we submitted our report and the education authority did not present any evidence on noise or acoustics, so unsurprisingly the SEND Tribunal ruled in favour of our client.

In the second case, the issue was more about noise levels from other sources.  The Education Authority’s educational audiologists had provided a report stating that the local authority’s named school complied with the requirements of Building Bulletin 93 “Acoustic Design of Schools”.  Unfortunately, they had used the criteria for mainstream classrooms and not the more stringent ones for classrooms for use by hearing-impaired students, which I thought was a rather surprising mistake for an educational audiologist to make.  They had also measured noise levels with windows closed and the heating systems turned off and had not mentioned this in their report, although the noise from the forced-air heaters was typically 20 dBA above those permitted under BB93, and in some rooms traffic noise was a problem when windows were open.

In this case I gave evidence at the tribunal.  The county council put forward a case based on the ideas that the heaters could be turned off when a hearing-impaired pupil needed to hear the teacher, and that a quiet room could be set aside for teaching her – effectively taking her out of class for much of the time.  The Tribunal was not impressed at having these suggestions put forward verbally, with no supporting evidence of,  for example, the suitability of the suggested “quiet room”.  I was frankly surprised by the poor standard of the evidence supplied by the education authority, notably the lack of written evidence and the fact that the senior educational audiologist who had written the report did not attend and sent his assistant, who at one stage was reduced to saying that she had a “gut feeling” that our client’s child would do better in the local authority’s named school.  And I thought that Educational Audiology was a science…

The tribunal, of course, found in favour of our client.  A few extracts from the Decision document are quite helpful in showing the approach that tribunals take to evidence :

“… Whilst we accept (the Headmaster’s) evidence that it may be possible to switch off or control the heating in individual classrooms, we are not confident firstly that this would be done on every occasion that (the pupil) was in a classroom given for example the advent of very cold weather nor that busy subject teachers would remember on every occaslon to turn the heating off in order to create an appropriate environment”. 

 “Whilst we take account that certain steps could be taken to improve the situation we do not believe that they are either entirely practical, likely to happen or going to be effective”

“We also reiterate point that we made earlier that if as a result of unacceptable noise levels (the pupil) is unable to access even one lesson that is one too many and will impact on  her access to the curriculum”. 

And having established that important principle, let’s wrap up with the one which gives me a nice warm feeling :

“We were impressed with the evidence given by Mr James and given the nature of his expertise and the thoroughness with which he conducted his assessment we accept his evidence that (the local authority’s named school) does not meet the necessary acoustic standards for hearing impaired children in the rooms that he visited”

Our client (who of course had been through a very long-drawn out, time-consuming and expensive process to get this result) was of course delighted with the result and was kind enough to provide a very fulsome testimonial which can be viewed here.  To prevent her from being deluged by junk email we have not listed her contact details but if any parents in a similar situation would like to talk to her about the SEND Tribunal process from a parent’s point of view, please contact me and I can put you in touch.

Adrian James

If this is inspiring you to consider purchasing CATT-Acoustic or upgrade your license please do get in touch with us.  That concludes our sales pitch for today…

It is recommended that you uninstall CATT v8 and install CATT v9 afresh – this does require a little bit of file juggling (particularly to make sure you don’t lose your license key and libraries in the process!)  If you have any problems or queries about the installation please do give us a call.

For more information on the update, and to download, go to www.catt.se/users.htm.

You can find more information on purchasing CATT-Acoustic or renewing your updates / support here.