Donate to the Ivan Tucker Bursary Fund
Help us to ensure pupils don't miss out on their education.
Ivan Tucker Bursary Scheme
What is the Ivan Tucker Bursary Scheme?
This is not a traditional bursary scheme. This is a new fundraising appeal in support of Mary Hare School’s core work.
Mary Hare School is a non-maintained special school. We charge a fee to the Local Authority who places a child with us. At any one time Mary Hare deals with around 85 Local Authorities from all over the UK. The basic fee pays for the education of a pupil plus the residential care of a pupil.
In my last school, class sizes were around 30 students and I found it very noisy. Sometimes the teacher would turn away and so I was unable to lip read. At Mary Hare it is lot easier to concentrate and the teachers are fully trained and very deaf aware. I have always been fairly confident but here I have been able to make lots of friends as we are able to have conversations because we don’t all talk at the same time, in my last school I found it hard sometimes to separate voices from the background noise.
When a family is offered a place at Mary Hare School for their child, in 50% of cases their Local Authority will agree to the funding required for this specialist education. Sadly that means that the other 50% have a much harder time securing the necessary funding. In many cases this means the family have to challenge their Local Authority in an educational tribunal. This causes a delay to the start date for a child, who must wait for the outcome of the tribunal before they can start school (at Mary Hare around 90% of educational tribunals are found in the family’s favour).
However when a young person wants to start at Mary Hare in Year 10 (GCSE year) or Year 12 (A Level year), we allow them to start at the beginning of term, regardless of the fact that they have no funding. We call these an ‘intervention placement’. In order to do this, we need to secure around £100,000 in bursaries each year to cover the costs until such time as the tribunal is heard.
Dr Ivan Tucker OBE was Principal of Mary Hare School from 1987 – 2004. He continued as CEO until he retired in 2011. Ivan was a passionate leader who believed that every deaf young person deserves the opportunity to develop their language skills to the full and have the chance to access the full national curriculum. This bursary scheme bears his name as a testament to the many years that Ivan dedicated to the education of deaf young people.
Keep up to date with Soundwave
Soundwave is our annual magazine showcasing the highlights of all Mary Hare activities across the last academic year. You can sign up to receive a digital copy of Soundwave which comes out every June.