Free Sign Language Resources for Secondary Schools
This academic year, The School of Signs is launching a new set of lessons to expand our resources to new audiences! While our first set of lessons were designed for primary school aged pupils, we are now excited to announce that we are introducing new free BSL lessons designed for secondary schools.
Just like all of our other lessons, these lessons will be able to be taught by teachers with no previous BSL knowledge, as each video lesson comes with pre-planned lesson plans and comprehensive teaching notes. Any secondary school can press play on these video lessons and start to teach British Sign Language.
What will pupils learn in these new BSL Lessons?
This new set of lessons focuses on building conversational skills rather than just vocab. Each lesson comes with a chance to watch a realistic conversation between two Deaf BSL users, and learn lots of questions and phrases to be used in practice. The topics of the ten new lessons are:
- Being Around Adventures
- Being Around Work
- Being Around Everyday Life
- Being Around The Home
- Being Around Events
- Being Around Activities
- Being Around Your Local Area
- Being Around People
- Being Around Transport
- Being Around Creativity
When can I teach these new lessons?
Starting on the 5th October 2026, we will release a new lesson every week! That means a one-hour lesson every Monday until the 7th December, giving you a whole term of lesson content.
On the platform’s Lessons page, you will see all the new topics in order of release, with a Coming Soon tag if they are yet to be released. Clicking on each lesson will tell you when it will be available to teach.
You can also stay up to date with all new updates and releases by following our social media channels @SignatureDeaf across Facebook and Instagram
Even before they are released, you can still preview the lesson plan to give you an idea of what will be covered and help you plan your lesson in advance if you would like to. Then, when the lesson is released, you just have to print the resources and press play!
How do I access these Sign Language lessons?
The lessons are delivered through The School of Signs platform and are completely free for schools and home educators to access.
If your school hasn’t signed up already, you just need to sign up using the button below. This will give you access to all 30 lessons on the platform. Multiple teachers and classes can be set up at the same school account, so if another teacher has already set up your school, you will be able to request to join the same school account.
If you are already signed up, just log in here, where you will find all the new lessons in their own category in the Lessons Tab.
While these new lessons are designed to build on the vocabulary from the first 20, there is no prior knowledge requirement. The lessons are designed to be as flexible as possible to allow pupils of all experience levels to get the most out of them.
This means that the teacher can choose exactly how much vocabulary to cover in each lesson, to allow classes that have already done a topic previously to not repeat themselves while keeping it accessible to beginners. Each lesson also comes with a thorough and customisable lesson plan which advises ways to adapt the resources to the audience.
If you think that pupils would benefit from doing some of introductory 20 lessons before getting stuck into these new lessons, you can dip in and out of whichever are the most useful. Each lesson is completely modular, and able to be covered in any order, so have a browse and see what is the most useful for your class.