Glenn Welldon, Alan Sabo, Brett Hall, Madeline Sadokierski, Penny Bales, Ward Tooker enjoy a reading session.

The 49 pupils at the school are inveterate clock-watches.

At 1.15pm the noisy lunchtime softball game stops as if by magic and the children start tidying up the playground before lining up to go back to their classrooms.

Farrar is a unique school in the State education system in NSW.

It teaches profoundly deaf children aged from three to 16 years by oral methods.

The Department of Educations runs special classes for partially deaf children in 79 other schools in NSW and runs the school at the Institute for Deaf and Blind Children at North Rocks.

At North Rocks deaf children in the secondary school are taught by "finger-speaking" methods.

A child who can hear learns to speak by imitation long before he can read. At Farrar it is the other way round.

Three-year-olds learn to read simple words as a preliminary to lip-reading.

Farrar takes deaf children at three, instead of the usual Education Department minimum age limit of four years and 9 months.

Children of four and five in kindergarten at other schools cover a whole range of activities before they tackle the intricacies of reading and writing, but the profoundly deaf three-year-olds at Farrar already has a lot of lost ground to make up in the field of language.

So they get straight down to reading, with remarkable results.

In first class, a six-year-olds draws circles round pictures of a zip and a zebra. She knows they both begin with "z" even though she never heard the sound - only "seen" it by lip-reading.

Teachers at Farrar say deaf children learn to read more quickly than hearing children because to them it opens up the world of communication.

Each Thursday morning the seven children in fourth class at Farrar go to Summer Hill Primary School to share lessons with the fourth class pupils there.

"The class has learned to be much more independent," said their teacher, Mrs. L. Davies, who has taught the same group of children since they were in second class.

"They see the Summer Hill Children working on their own and they are learning to do more things for themselves, like looking up facts in a dictionary."

Fourth classes at Farrar and Summer Hill are now working jointly on a project about the sea.

Principal of Farrar, Mr. A. Dixon, who suggested the experiment, drives the children to Summer Hill each week.

Mr. Dixon has a staff of 11 teachers, all of whom have special training deaf children.

One first-year girl wears bright blue nail polis. It is one of the special privileges allowed to the 11 pupils in the secondary school to distinguish them from the "babies".

At the end of primary grades the pupils are assessed and some go on to ordinary high schools.

This year three students will sit for the School Certificate - "and they'll get it", said Mr. Dixon.

"The boy is going into an apprenticeship as a toolmaker and the two girls have jobs lined up as clerks in the Commonwealth Bank."

All the children at Farrar wear hearing aids to help them pick up what few sounds they can.

The school has two audio group aids with headphones which each child in a class can plug in to listen to music to speak to each other.

They love music. The Beatles were the greatest thing that ever happened to deaf children, said Mr Dixon.

"They can pick up the rhythm, and this helps put more rhythm in their own speech."

Farrar draws its pupils from within a radius of 25 miles.

The Department of Education provides free taxis to and from school for children under 10. The older children use public transport.

Tracey Kerr, 4 watchs intently as Deputy Principal of the Farrar School for the Deaf, Mrs Dorothy Mann, explains a new sound with the aid of electronic equipment.

Deaf Children raised $150 Pupils at Farrar Public School for the Deaf children in Croydon Park have raised $150 for the Freedom from Hunger Campaign.

The 50 children at the school ran messages, washed cars and did other odd jobs to earn the money to help people less fortunate than themselves.

A group of children are pictures in a classroom (above)

School captains Alexandra Boyd of Haberfield and Lon Hannah of Campise presented a cheque to the regional director of Freedom From Hunger, Mr J. Lorimer (below).