Transcript

Narrator

Welcome to NextSense

Our story begins in 1860 when Thomas Patterson, who is himself deaf, founded the first school in Australia for children who are deaf, and the school would soon expand to include children who are blind.

Today we reach thousands of Australians and our services support people of all ages.

In the following decade, the institution would lay the foundation for the organisation we are today.

It would fundamentally change access to education for children with hearing and vision loss. In the next 20 years, we focused on structuring education and creating best practises that led to investing in training teachers right here in Australia.

In 1908, we enrolled a student called Alice Betteridge, the first deaf blind child to be formally educated in Australia.

Today, NextSense Education Services lead the way in redefining what's possible for students with hearing and vision loss.

When the government assumed responsibility for education of our students, it gave us the opportunity to expand our role even further.

We focused on bilingual education in English and Auslan, established schools to accommodate children with different educational needs, pioneered remote learning to reach families in the farthest regions of Australia using technology, supported students in mainstream schools and evolved our early intervention services and built one of the earliest paediatric audiology centres and a program for newborn hearing screening.

From the start, we've embraced innovation, which accelerated in the 1970s. We dedicated resources to research and development and adopted the latest technologies. This led to advances such as computerised Braille and a digital version of the first Auslan dictionary.

Then, after some of the first cochlear implants for children pioneered by SCIC in the late 1980s, our early collaboration led to an ideal merger.

Today, we are one of Australia's largest cochlear implant programmes for people of all ages.

In 1994, we established Renwick College, offering a Master's degree in Special Education that specialised in sensory disability.

Today, in partnership with Macquarie University, we continue our leading professional education program.

In 2021 we brought our organisation together under a single brand and name, NextSense, and began the build of our new centre for innovation, a space designed for our clients and for industry changing collaboration.

Here we can trial and share new ideas and put our collective knowledge to work and together create what's next.