Speech Language and Communication at New Road

How it develops and why it is important

Speech and language skills are absolutely fundamental to our wellbeing and success in life. Language skills are also important for our learning. In schools and at home, we learn new skills and acquire new knowledge by listening to others talking and reading written language. The demands on language skills only increase as children get older and progress through their education.

Families and school are most important in helping children to develop these skills, which affect so many areas of life.

• Making friends
• Learning
• Joining in at home and at school
• Making choices and dealing with change

Attention and Listening

• Children need not only to physically hear but to be able to listen and pay attention to language around them.
• They need to develop these skills before their own language can develop successfully.
•  Attention is a skill which develops from birth and is the ability to look and listen to what others are saying or doing.
• Attention can be learned from interactions with family and friends e.g. Look at what this is doing e.g. while playing with a toy.

Play and Interaction

• Young children learn early communication skills through play.
• They need to be given lots of opportunities to play.
•  Play, particularly imaginative play is an important step in language development. For example through play a child will realise that a toy cup in the tea set represents a real cup in the kitchen even though they look different.
• Adults playing with children will also be modelling language use and using words to comment on what is happening.

Understanding Language

• Children need to be able to understand words before they can use them.
• With a good foundation of Listening and Attention and Play skills children will begin to develop an understanding of language.
• Generally young children can understand a lot more than they can say.

Expressive Language

• Children learn how to talk using words and then sentences to express themselves and join in conversations.
• They begin with one word then join two words together, then three, four etc.

Speech

• Children develop their use of different speech sounds so that they can be understood by others.
• Children develop these sounds at different rates, some children continue to develop these sounds up until the age of seven.
• It is quite common for children to substitute sounds for others at this stage, for example they may say ‘tup’ for ‘cup’.

Normal Language Development

• The Blank Language Development model, was developed by Blank, Rose and Berlin in 1978.
•  Its main aim is to develop children's reasoning and language capabilities.
• The model was established when its creators studied the language used by teachers in classrooms.
• This is how they saw the basic levels in language development;

Level 1:  Naming things

Level 2:  Describing things - answering Who? What? Where? questions

Level 3:  Talking about stories and events

Level 4:  Solving problems and answering - Why? How? questions

• It was found that;

       60% of 3 year olds normally understand level 1 & 2.

       65% of 5 year olds normally understand level 3 & 4.

• It’s often easy to identify children who have difficulties with unclear speech, as you will find it difficult to understand their talking, and your child may be frustrated when their speech is not understood.
• Language, on the other hand, can be a hidden difficulty which is harder to identify as we often can’t observe whether someone has or hasn’t understood.
• In school we use the above Blank Model as a basic guide to help us support children with possible language delay or difficulties.
• It provides the steps we can take to support children in class and in their learning.

What do we do at New Road Primary School? 

In school, we subscribe to Speech and Language Link who provide us with tools and resources to support our children who have difficulties in these areas. They also provide a very useful portal for parents which can help you support your children at home.

All children entering school in EYFS are screened within the first term of joining using SpeechLink, a specialist speech and language assessment tool. 

Should a child have a difficulty in one or more areas, an intervention programme is devised by the assessment tool which will then be implemented.

The intervention will be in place for 6 – 8 weeks, after which a second assessment will be carried out to measure the impact it has had.

If the child continues to have difficulties in these areas, a discussion will be had with our named Speech and Language Therapist prior to a referral.

If agreed a referral will then be made by the school to the MCH Speech and Language Team.

They will decide if the child meets their criteria for further specialist intervention.

The MCH Speech and Language team typically have three face to face sessions which the parent must attend; in between these sessions, the Teaching Assistant will deliver the programme collating the data for the next session.

If a child does not meet criteria for specialist intervention then New Road Primary School can offer specialist intervention as devised by the SpeechLink programme.

These interventions will be run by our specialist speech and language support staff.

Parents can find out more about speech and language support from SpeechLink via their  portal at

https://speechandlanguage.info/parents

The  Parent Portal is available for parents to use FREE of change and provides a plethora of resource, activities and information to help support children at home.