Speech Therapy Services (Children)

Gary Streeter Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2010 Westminster Hall

[Pat Glass]

I absolutely agree, and I can go on from that.

The National Autistic Society has identified that 70% of young people with autism, the vast majority of whom have an underlying language and/or communication disorder even if that is restricted to higher-order language difficulties, also have a mental health difficulty. Shelter tells us that a significant proportion of people classified as homeless have an underlying language and communication disorder. I could go on and on.

However, those issues are not limited to language and communication disorders; they are seen across many areas of children’s health, such as physiotherapy, occupational health and, one of the huge ones for me, child and adolescent mental health services. Review after review has identified that, to address the issues, diagnosis needs to be timely and carefully carried out by specialists—speech and language therapists—and services need to be appropriate to need and easily accessible, a point made by the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys. Specialists in education and health need to work in partnership with the child and the family at the centre, not separately, and not, in the case of health, in a clinic far removed from the day-to-day life of the child in the classroom.

Unlike, I suspect, many other Members here, I do not see more and more speech and language therapists as the only answer. Although I want to add my thanks to specialist speech therapists for the incredible work that they do, and although I consider them part of the way forward, they are not the only answer. In my view and experience, early intervention and appropriate provision include four fundamental necessities. The first is better training for all early years education staff—teachers and support staff. Given that we know that in some cases there will be up to five children with a significant speech, language and communication disorder in an early years classroom, it seems reasonable that every such classroom should have within it one adult—a teacher or a specialist support assistant—who has additional experience or qualifications in this area. I was an assistant director of education in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) a number of years ago, and we made that a requirement of our accessibility strategy. As a result, we saw a shift in the language-into-literacy issues—in the communication difficulties that were preventing children from learning to read and to progress in other areas.

Secondly, language development needs to be an integral part of the whole curriculum. The hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys talked about pulling children out of lessons and classrooms for one-to-one speech therapy sessions. Such sessions are isolated from what is going on in the child’s classroom, lessons and life, and are much less valuable than ensuring that the child is surrounded by a rich and appropriate vocabulary each and every day, and that lessons are planned and delivered to include language development as key steps.

Thirdly, specialist speech and language therapists need to be actively involved in curriculum design and delivery and in-service training for staff in schools. Finally, we need an accountability framework that understands the importance of language development in learning, and holds not only head teachers and governors, but those who commission children’s health services, to account for the training of staff and the outcomes of children with speech and language difficulties. By not intervening in an appropriate, timely and systemic manner we stand aside and allow generations of children to be labelled behaviourally disordered, conduct-disordered or odd and difficult, or as having learning difficulties. That is wrong and unnecessary, and too often it blights the lives of those children and their families.

As the Minister is here, I want to make a further plea to her to consider transferring the funding for children’s heath services to local authorities alongside funding for public health. It will not be sufficient funding, but at least it and the bulk of the responsibility will be in the same place, which will give parents a little more to hang their hats on when arguing for services.

Again, I congratulate the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys on securing this important debate. I will work positively with anyone, on either side of the Chamber, who highlights these matters and is prepared to work with me to address them.

[Mr Gary Streeter (in the Chair)]

We have 14 minutes until wind-ups begin, and six colleagues are trying to catch my eye, so contributions of around seven or eight minutes would be most welcome.