Speech Therapy Services (Children)

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2010 Westminster Hall

[Paul Maynard]

I agree entirely. The hon. Gentleman has anticipated my next point. Speech and language therapists are there not just to help children, but to help the entire children’s work force understand that communication needs to be the golden thread running through everything they do. They need to be equipped to train staff, teachers and others who work with children, as well as the children themselves. I ask the Minister to confirm that she will do all she can to ensure that we recruit more speech and language therapists to meet the unmet needs that are out there.

The better communication action plan made a specific commitment to universal screening as part of the healthy child programme. Many major bodies, including the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, which I suspect has managed to get many supporters to attend the debate, wants to see that occur at age two and five, in advance of the reading assessment. What steps will the Minister take to ensure that that aspect of the action plan is taken into account?

Another important aspect that is often overlooked is that when we discuss children’s speech therapy we often think of those aspects that are what I describe as being high incidence, but low need. In other words, many children face communication difficulties, such as language delay, but their support needs are actually quite low. There is a much smaller group, which has much more complex needs, but the incidence of that need is relatively low. That poses a particular problem in commissioning. I wonder what the Minister’s views are on how we balance those two competing aspects, because where there is low incidence but high need, it is often more of a health intervention, rather than an educational intervention, that is required.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Just this last year, I witnessed what I can only describe as the transformation of a young boy from being unable to communicate to being able to talk quite clearly within a matter of months, so I have seen at first hand the work that can be done. One of our concerns, which is shared by many people who look after young boys and who try to train them, relates to the financial provision. In relation to the comprehensive spending review cuts that have been made and how they will affect provision, does the hon. Gentleman agree that the front-line service of speech therapy should be retained and that people should know that the moneys are there for young people?

[Paul Maynard]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I agree entirely. That is why we say continually that the most vulnerable are those that really should be protected, and front-line services will be protected.

Whenever we try to abolish quangos in particular, we can always find one saving grace in every quango that gives us a justification for keeping it. With Becta, which provides educational technical equipment, one of the saving graces was the work that it did in the augmentative and assistive communication sector—AAC for short, to save me a bit of time. Can the Minister confirm whether the funding that was originally to go through Becta to the AAC sector will still go to it to fund not just the specialist provision of AAC equipment, but the leadership roles in the sector? That is another part of the better communication action plan that I hope will be continued throughout the year of speech, learning and communication in 2011. Will she also commit to re-examining the issues of provision in the AAC sector? She may not be aware of the problems facing the ACE—Aiding Communication in Education—centre in Oxford, which faces closure as a result of some of the changes in that charity and the funding of the wider sector.

Will the Minister support the proposals from the communication champion, Jean Gross, for a new AAC commissioning model that reflects the differences between high incidence, low need, and low incidence, higher need, which are crucial to a proper appreciation of the sector’s needs?

I said that I did not want continually to go in for shocking statistics, but let me give just one, which is that 55% of children in the more deprived areas arrive at primary school with some form of language delay. That does not necessarily mean that there is anything going on; it just means that they are delayed in the formation of basic skills. That happens for a range of reasons, but often it can be something as simple as mum and dad not talking to them when they were babies.

Booktrust, a charity of which many hon. Members may be aware, does fantastic work in more deprived areas just by handing out bags of books to young mums to encourage them to read and by saying to young dads, “It’s a good thing to sit down with your young child and read them a story. Don’t just watch the football match. Read “Peppa Pig” or whatever children’s literature you happen to have to hand; it helps your children.”

Can the Minister confirm, in light of the CSR, that the very important funding that Booktrust receives from the Government, which allows it to access £4 of private funding for every £1 of Government funding, will continue in order to help us to deal with that language delay and gap in the most deprived areas? That is just one example of the philosophy of early intervention, which is gradually receiving unanimous, all-party support as a principle. What it means in policy terms often varies greatly, but the principle of early intervention is now accepted by all in the House, I hope. It allows us to escape the departmental silo thinking that has bedevilled public policy formation in this country for far too long.

How does the Minister think that the pupil premium, which both coalition parties advocated pre-election, will benefit children requiring speech and language therapy at the moment? In particular, does she agree on the importance of appropriate diagnosis and that improving the quality of diagnosis might lead to fewer children being diagnosed as having special educational needs? Does she recognise that one goal of speech, language and communication therapy must be to take pupils off the SEN register because their language delay has been dealt with, the gaps have been filled and they are now able to participate fully in society? I ask that because there is a particular problem with stigmatisation.

Even 30 years ago, when I had speech therapy, I was taken out of my primary school and transported down to the village health centre. I was regarded as different—special—because I had to be taken out. That was 30 years ago; one would like to think that things had moved on. Unfortunately, the stigma is still there. I urge the Minister to ensure that more and more services can be delivered in the school setting and do not require the pupil to be stigmatised, or made to look different or special.

Let me explain one way of doing what I have described. At Fleetwood high school, in the constituency of Lancaster and Fleetwood, which neighbours mine, children with special educational needs are dealt with under the same umbrella as those who come under the gifted and talented scheme. There is not such a difference between them as one might think, because very many people with special educational needs, and in particular speech and language needs, are also very gifted and talented young men and women. The two are very often the same group. I urge the Minister to consider how such an approach can reduce stigmatisation.

I warmly welcome the ambition of the forthcoming Green Paper to equip parents to have more choice in and more say over how their children are treated by the “system”. One of the grave frustrations of so many parents whom I meet in my advice surgeries—and, I am sure, those whom other hon. Members meet in their surgeries—is that when they take their children to the office of the relevant public organisation and sit down to have a discussion about their child’s needs, they immediately find that there is a form before the public servant in front of them and they are then forced somehow to adjust their child’s needs to fit the existing boxes on the form. If their child’s needs do not quite fit, there is a problem; they do not quite get the tailored support that they need.

Can the Minister make any suggestions about how we start to change the tick-box culture? I think that this is the most crucial question in public policy at the moment: how do we get away from a situation in which services are designed for people to fit into and move to a situation in which services are designed to fit around the needs of the individual? That is important.