PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Speech and Language Disorders: Training (6 September 2018)

We are committed to supporting children with speech, language and communication needs. We have a special educational needs and disability (SEND) school workforce contract in place which provides strategic support to the workforce in mainstream and special schools. This enables schools to deliver high quality SEND provision which meets the needs of an increasingly broad range of special educational needs (SEN). The contract will monitor any gaps in provision and propose ways to meet these gaps through working with relevant SEN organisations including those who commission services. This contract will run until March 2020.

I recognise the importance of support in schools for spoken language, which underpins the development of reading and writing. Early support for language development is also important. Therefore, as part of our drive to improve social mobility through education, we announced in our action plan ‘Unlocking Talent, Fulfilling Potential’ that the department is working with Public Health England and the Department for Health and Social Care to improve early language outcomes for disadvantaged children. ‘Unlocking Talent, Fulfilling Potential’ can be accessed at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/improving-social-mobility-through-education.

We want to help provide health visitors with additional tools and training to identify and support children’s early speech, language and communication needs. We will do this by taking the following actions. Firstly, we will develop training and guidance to support these professionals, targeted to those areas of the greatest need. We will also develop an ‘early language assessment tool’ to help health visitors identify emerging language needs so that the right support can be put in place.