This will deliver an innovative, high quality intervention for children with communication difficulties in mainstream schools across the whole of Birmingham. It will cover more than 88 initial schools which have a perceived high level of need and are willing to work collaboratively to meet the needs of the children.

The aim is to support children in their everyday environments at school and home. The school’s designated speech and language therapist will enable school and parents to meet the communication needs of children, through development of staff and parent knowledge, skills and resources. Many of the children’s needs are now being met without the more specialist input of a speech and language therapist.

This approach enables the therapist to be involved with a broader range of children than is otherwise the case. It is also reducing the ‘caseload’ of children needing intensive support, leaving each therapist with more time to spend on those most at need.
Collaboration with other agencies and with parents is an essential component. Targets are set to facilitate the child’s communicative development, increase the child’s self esteem, and increase staff and parents’ involvement and confidence.

Within normal classroom practice there is a greater emphasis on focused speaking and listening. Talk for a specific purpose, in small groups, reinforces thinking skills, listening skills and is often being used to bolster activites related to citizenship. There are many cases in school where it’s good to talk.

Parallel to this, groups of workers from a broad range of Under Fives agencies have been working to produce generic leaflets based on common messages about speaking and listening with babies, children and young people of varying ages. These messages have been agreed with a wide range of workers and with groups of parents. The leaflets will be widely available and may be supported with copies of a video reinforcing the same messages.

This is all part of the drive to counter early language delay in young children and cut off the flow of people needing later preventative work.