Sheffield: a community-wide strategic approach to speech, language and communication

The context

  • Total population 539,800, including 125,600 children and young people aged 0-19
  • 36Children’s Centres
  • 133maintained primary schools, 24 maintained secondary schools and 10 maintained special schools

Drivers for change

  • The appointment of a new Director of Children’s Services with a passion and vision for developing children’s communication skills.
  • Awareness that the city had worked hard to improve children’s literacy skills, but not yet focused as strongly onoracy.
  • Excellent multi-agency partnership working, established in the National Year of Reading, on which to build.

Aims of strategy

  • That every Sheffield child will be articulate and literate by the age of 11.

The Journey

The Director of Children’s Services organised a workshop for staff together with Creative Partnerships, focusing on children’s talk. The idea of a community-wide ‘ESCAL’ (Every Sheffield Child Articulate and Literate) strategy came from this workshop.

The strategy is linked to the overall aims and corporate plans of the city. Strategic partners in ESCAL include libraries, the Sheffield Partnership Board, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the cultural industries, sporting bodies, the Universities, the NHS, Lifelong Learning, voluntary and community groups, Creative Partnerships, the Fostering Service and home based carers.

There was much local activity on which to build, particularly ‘Sheffield’s Talking’ – a multi-agency early years initiative that incorporates Every Child a Talker and aims to improve the skills and expertise of the early years workforce.

An operational group works to draw all the strands of activity together. Led by the Principal Advisor for Communication, Language and Literacy, the group includes a member of the learning support team, a deputy headteacher, the speech and language therapy mainstream schools team leader, the manager ofSheffield’s Talking, a senior literacy consultant, an Ethnic Minority and Traveller Achievement Service consultant the Every Child a Talker lead, and Family Learning.

Efforts to improve children’s speech, language and communication skills are structured around three ‘Waves’ of intervention

Wave 1 / Everyday practice in settings and classrooms that develops communication skills / All children
Wave 2 / Small group additional intervention / Just below age-related expectations
Wave 3 / Individual intervention with a trained and supported teaching assistant / Struggling
Intensive intervention on an individual basis with a trained language specialist / Lowest attaining

Wave 1, the universal preventive/promotional element of provision, involves work in early years settings and in schools to develop all children’s communication skills through communication-supportive environments, effective learning and teaching strategies, and the involvement of parents and carers.

Wave 2, the targeted element, involves time limited small group interventions delivered by early years practitioners, teachers and teaching assistants, supported by specialists in speech, language and communication.

Wave 3, the specialist element, is for children with significant and persisting speech, language and communication difficulties.

Wave 1

At Wave 1, in the early years a multi-agency team has developed a training framework at three levels (awareness, enhanced and specialist) and is delivering this to practitioners in the whole range of settings. Level 1 (awareness), for example, has four modules to be undertaken in sequence: attunement training, communication development and supporting strategies, communication development – what can go wrong and supporting strategies - and parents as partners. This Level 1 training is mandatory. Level 2 training is for practitioners who want to develop a lead role in developing a language rich environment in their settings and supporting children with communication difficulties. Level 3 is for those who have a significant role in identifying and assessing children’s communication needs, who work specifically with families and their children with identified communication difficulties and support other practitioners in this area.

Other ‘universal’ Wave 1 early years work in Sheffield includes training on creating communication-friendly spaces and supporting language development in the outdoor environment.

For parents, the Family Learning Service has developed ‘Family Chatter Bags’ – attractive take-home kits that enable them to create communication - promoting play spaces in the home. The Family Learning workshops model for parents how to use theseplay spaces to develop their children’s speech and language.

In primary schools, the initiatives in place to develop speaking and listening are Pie Corbett’s ‘Talk for Writing’, Philosophy 4 Children, wooden ‘soap boxes’, for children to use (culminating in a ‘Speakers’ corner’ event in the city centre), podcasting, work with Creative Partnerships and regular platforms for the performance of children’s work. 100 primary schools are being encouraged to become ‘ESCAL’ accredited schools, each identifying an ‘ESCAL’ Champion who attends half termlyworkshops run by the local authority. A similar accreditation is offered to Early Years settings, parents/carers and childminders.

Wave 2 and 3

With a staff of 10.5 speech and language therapists (SLTs) and 1.5 assistants for the city, the SLT service developed creative approaches to meeting the needs of the high numbers of children referred.

  • There are approximately 2000 children on the SLT caseload in mainstream schools. At the last evaluation, around 40% of these had speech sound difficulties, a large proportion of which would be ‘curable’ if given timely intervention. Research shows that if left without intervention beyond 5 years 6 months, many of these children will go on to have significant literacy difficulties and are at risk of social isolation. Input required is intensive, but short term. However for many schools, these children are not a priority at the point where intervention is timely for the child. The Sheffield SLT service has therefore developed the use of highly trained SLT Assistants to provide short intensive blocks, with the therapist doing baseline and outcome measures, and setting the goals. Although support from school and parents is advantageous, it is not essential. Outcome data collected so far has shown this to be a very effective model.
  • The remaining 60% of the caseload have language difficulties, the majority of which are not ‘curable’. For these children, the support for intervention needs to come from school, as their needs are long term. The SLT Service’s role here is around enabling education staff to support these children, both by explicitly building their language skills and altering classroom practice to create an inclusive environment.
  • There are many additional children not referred to the service who have language difficulties, who are then able to benefit from a service which focuses on en-skilling staff working in education. Although there are numerous interventions focusing on literacy and numeracy, there is very little currently available which targets language skills. Over the past year, the service in Sheffield has been working to develop Wave 2 intervention packages targeting vocabulary learning, narrative skills, attention and listening, and language nurturing. These packages aim to work with groups of 3 children, twice weekly for 20 minutes over an 18 week period. The SLT service is beginning to trial these in some schools in order to develop an evidence base. If the outcomes are positive, the service will then be able to offer training to schools which will enable them to provide a range of language interventions in the same way that they provide literacy and numeracy interventions.
  • Where schools buy in additional SLT Services,it has been possible to develop new models of working. Currently 19 schools are buying SLT time in this way. One model which has been very effective involves all the children in nursery settings accessing a six week early language group once a week. These groups of six children are run by teaching staff. Baseline and outcome measures are taken, and children who require further input will attend a second group which may be language based or speech based. This model requires a significant amount of input from the SLT service initially in order to train and mentor school staff, but now runs with minimal support. This model has been effective primarily because the senior management team in the school have seen language skills as a priority area, and have targeted resources accordingly.
  • There are currently around 350 children on the caseload with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) who access an enhanced service. This is a multi-professional service whereby teaching assistants from Sheffield’s Specialist Support Services work alongside specialist SLTs to provide a service which

-provides training and mentoring to SENCOs, teachers and teaching assistants who are working with children with SLI, raising schools’ capacities to identify and support this group of children;

-demonstrates and carries out 1:1 therapy that can be reinforced during the week by the child’s teaching assistant;

-integrates the child’s SLTtargets into the wider curriculum targets, supporting language for learning as well as language for socialisation;

-supports school staff to do this within the context of the classroom and curriculum activities;

-develops the school’s awareness of how SLI impacts on a child’ssocialisation and learning thereby promoting educational and social inclusion;

-ensures there is a smooth transition between key stages so children do not have to wait for input at these vital points;

-offers parent support groups.

Impact

At macro level, impact of ESCAL will be measured by progress on National Indicator targets for overall achievement and narrowing the gaps on the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile, and over the course of at the end of Key Stage 2.

At micro level, the Children’s Trust aims to develop child monitoring systems, building on those used in Every Child a Talker, to track children’s progress in speech, language and communication. The SLT service will also evaluate pre and post intervention gains for the Wave 2 interventions schools have put in place.

Critical success factors

  • Vision from the top
  • Strong operational leadership vested in one person (the Principal Advisor for Communication, Language and Literacy)
  • A history of successful community-wide strategies involving wide-ranging partnerships
  • A history of integrated, systematic school improvement/inclusion team work with schools on planning and evaluating intervention programmes, and on rigorous identification of need and tracking progress.

What next/challenges

Next steps will involve

  • developing a coherent training strategy for awareness and enhanced and specialist-level training for all staff in primary schools to mirror that available to early years practitioners;
  • accrediting schools and settings with an ESCAL quality mark;
  • working innovatively with teenage parents, foster carers, Traveller families, fathers and families from minority ethnic groups to help them promote language development;
  • developing a ‘Talk Volunteers’ scheme in which volunteers will be trained to work with children in schools.

June 2010