At Kennington Primary School, a small group of students with hearing impairment work with teachers at the Bendigo Deaf Facility.

Teacher of the Deaf Brooke Howman works intensively with students to build skills they might have missed out on.

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While hearing checks are now compulsory for babies, some children lose their hearing in early childhood. Their parents may not realise hearing is an issue until quite late.

This can cause huge delays in language development, which can flow on to reading and writing and even social skills in the playground.

“I don’t think people realise that children or toddlers learn a lot of language just from being around language,” Ms Howman said.

“Our kids don’t get that because, if [they’re] not focussed on the sound, or they haven’t learnt to listen then they’re not picking up new words. So they come, and they’re quite delayed in vocab.”

There are seven children who use the facility at Kennington Primary. To be eligible students must have hearing loss of 40 decibels or more, across both ears.

With teacher Sharon Grant, Ms Howman helps the children develop language skills. It means working on phonics, speech, sound recognition and the ability to break speech and sounds down.

“For us it’s about getting as much language into them as possible,” Ms Howman said.

“The amount of words that they’ve got when they come to school is much lower than for the average hearing child.”

Even learning to listen is a new skill. Basic exercises – asking children to colour in a frog or a dog, for instance – help the students build the listening muscle in their brain.

“They have to learn to listen. Those neural pathways in their brain, they have to regrow,” Ms Howman said.

“They’re like, ‘Woah, what’s all this sound’ ... they have to make meaning out of that sound, and their brain hasn’t had to do that before.”

Simple things can cause the kids to trip up.

Students who are bilingual with Auslan and English may miss joining words or articles when writing, for instance. This reflects the grammar of Auslan, which doesn’t use words like ‘a’ and ‘the’ and ‘is’.

Even with technology like hearing aids or cochlear implants, students can still struggle to hear in the classroom.

To combat this, all teachers with students who have hearing impairments wear a radio frequency system.

This transmits sound directly to students’ hearing aids or cochlear implants.

Students in the facility also participate in a Deaf Studies subject.

It helps them learn the social skills around making friends, keeping friends, and even how to speak to their friends.

For instance, Ms Howman said, the rules in children's games are constantly changing. Where a student might pick up the first set, they may not hear the later changes.

Many Australians wait years before taking action on hearing loss.

Audiologist Natalie Betts said because most hearing loss is gradual, often people develop mechanisms to cope with it.

Most people have mild to moderate hearing loss by the time they visit an audiologist.

The consequences of leaving hearing loss untreated can be severe.

It’s not just a matter of having the TV to loud for your partner’s comfort. Those with a certain level of hearing loss can become isolated, and more likely to develop dementia.

“We find that people start to withdraw from family and friends, because they can’t hear so they avoid social situations, and that can lead to depression,” Ms Betts said.

“It can cause breakdown of family relationships because everyone’s frustrated because a person can’t hear.

“People start to withdraw socially and it starts to affect dementia and other pathways in the brain.”

Ms Betts recommends that anyone over the age of 60 has a hearing check every year.

By 2060, about 7.8 million Australians may suffer from hearing loss.

IPods could be contributing to a wave of hearing problems that will hit down the track, Ms Betts said.

Noise damage incurred in people’s teens or early 20s may not develop into hearing loss until much later.

“There are concerns that we’re creating a generation of people that in 20, 30 years time are going to have hearing loss,” Ms Betts said.

“There’s lots of young people listening to their iPods and it’s too loud.”

Sedgwick's David Thorne was reluctant at first to acknowledge he needed hearing aids.

“I didn’t want to be encumbered by them, and also I had the impression that they were quite expensive,” he said.

His hearing had gradually deteriorated. It meant his wife Ruth often had to repeat to him what was said in company.

At home it he needed the volume up louder than was comfortable for Mrs Thorne if they were watching a video.

Eventually they agreed he needed to try to improve his hearing.

Mr Thorne discovered in his research a huge disparity in cost, even for hearing aids that should have been in the same price bracket.

“I found for those $4000 [hearing aids], for the same thing you could be paying up to $9000 depending on who was selling them,” he said.

“There was a fair bit of disparity between companies that were selling hearing aids and audiologists.”

The change was remarkable when Mr Thorne turned the hearing aids on. Subtle sounds, like bird song, or frogs on the dam were immediately audible.

“I suddenly realised that I could re-engage with the world around me more naturally. I hear sounds now that I haven’t heard for years,” he said.

“As my brain readjusts, I find that I’m able to interact more normally with people and also my environment.

“It was quite a delight at the beginning to realise I still had the facility to hear more clearly than I used to.”

Hearing Awareness Week, March 3-9.

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