Time to Talk

Implementing Outstanding Practice in Speech, Language and Communication

Jean Gross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351986656
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Time to Talk provides a powerful and accessible resource for practitioners working to improve children's language and communication skills. Showcasing effective approaches in schools and settings across the country from the early years through primary and secondary education, it summarises research on what helps children and young people develop good communication skills, and highlights the importance of key factors: a place to talk, a reason to talk and support for talk.

This timely second edition has been fully updated to reflect Pupil Premium, curriculum, assessment and special needs reforms, and can be used by individual practitioners as well as supporting a whole-school or setting approach to spoken language.

It includes:

• whole-class approaches to developing all children and young people's speaking and listening skills;
• 'catch-up' strategies for those with limited language;
• ways of differentiating the curriculum for those with difficulties;
• ways in which settings and schools can develop an effective partnership with specialists to help children with more severe needs;
• models schools can use to commission their own speech and language therapy services;
• examples of good practice in supporting parents/carers to develop their children's language skills; and
• answers to practitioners' most frequently asked questions about speech and language.

Now in full-colour, this practical and engaging book is for all who are concerned about how to help children and young people with limited language and communication skills – school leaders, teachers, early-years practitioners, and the speech and language therapists they work with.

1 Speech, language and communication – a growing issue

A growing issue

The ability to communicate – to say what you want to say and to understand what other people are saying – is fundamental to life chances.

Some of the statistics about the links between language skills and life chances are startling. For example:

• early spoken language skills are the most significant predictor of literacy levels at age 11 (Moss and Washbrook, 2016);

• language at age three is a key element in a composite ‘brain health’ measure that accurately predicts which individuals will be of very high cost to society 35 years later (Caspi et al., 2016);

• vocabulary at age five is one of the most significant predictors of the qualifications pupils achieve when they leave school (Feinstein and Duckworth, 2006);

• more than half of children starting school in socially disadvantaged areas of England have delayed language (Read On. Get On., 2014, 2015); and

• two-thirds of seven- to fourteen-year-olds with serious behaviour problems have language impairment (Cohen et al., 1998).

Numbers of children with difficulties in language are rising. In 2016, nearly three-quarters of health visitors reported that they had seen a significant increase in children with speech and communication delay over the past two years (Figure 1.1).

Head teachers are increasingly concerned about pupils starting school with limited language skills. This is often linked to social deprivation, but not exclusively so. I often meet teachers in affluent areas who tell me about children of ‘cash-rich, time-poor’ parents who are unable to hold a conversation, who know how to swipe a phone but not how to talk in sentences, who go on expensive holidays abroad but cannot tell you what a pebble is.

There is much speculation about the reasons for poor communication skills, from over-use of technology, to less time for parents to talk with their children, or even to the invention of central heating (which means families don’t have to be in one room any more in order to keep warm). We have little hard evidence one way or another to prove whether these social changes have caused a rise in language difficulties, but the end result is a problem that schools and settings increasingly feel the need to address.

Figure 1.1 Proportion of health visitors reporting that they have seen an increase in numbers of children with speech and communication delay in the past two years.

Talk in the classroom

There is a large volume of research showing that children achieve better when their classrooms provide authentic opportunities for reasoned discussion in class. Not only their language but their learning improves (Mercer, 2016). The influential EPPSI study (Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2011), for example, found that teachers in highly effective schools used dialogic teaching and learning, involving collaborative talk and instructional conversations. A recent rigorous study for the Education Endowment Foundation (Jay et al., 2017) found a significant uplift to attainment in English, maths and science after teachers introduced dialogic techniques in their classrooms. And the Cambridge Primary Review (Alexander, 2009), after an extensive review of the literature, concluded that we should ‘Make a concerted effort to ensure that language, particularly spoken language, achieves its full potential as a key to cognitive development, learning and successful teaching.’

Similarly, a number of Ofsted thematic national reports have identified effective practice in speaking and listening as a key feature of outstanding schools.

Extracts from national Ofsted reports

The prioritisation of speech, language and communication was the cornerstone of leaders’ work with disadvantaged children, especially funded two-year-olds.

– Teaching and Play in the Early Years – a Balancing Act? (Ofsted 2015)

In the most effective schools visited, inspectors saw teachers thread rich opportunities for speaking and listening into lessons. In turn, this led to improved standards in writing.

– Ofsted Annual Report 2009/10

A common feature of the most successful schools in the survey was the attention they gave to developing speaking and listening.

– Removing Barriers to Literacy (Ofsted 2011c)

Current policies

Current national policies and initiatives present both opportunities and challenges for children’s language development. Opportunities are strongest in the early years, where the curriculum gives a high priority to communication and language, and assessment and accountability systems encourage settings to give it priority. There is important new investment from the Big Lottery in improving disadvantaged children’s communication and language in the first three years of life, through its ten-year ‘A Better Start’ programme. Central government funding of free education and care for the most disadvantaged two-year-olds, and all three-year-olds, presents huge opportunities to improve language outcomes; the pilot of the two-year-old funding showed significant impact on children’s language development – though only where the provision was of high quality (Smith et al., 2009).

The nationally mandated health visitor and integrated review of children’s development at age two presents an opportunity to detect speech, language and communication difficulties early, and this is indeed the case in many local areas. Ofsted noted in a recent report (Ofsted, 2016), however, that across the local authorities surveyed, around a quarter of their disadvantaged children were missing out on these crucial assessments by health visitors. Information sharing and integration were also often poor; ‘even where local authorities had a systematic approach to ensuring that all two-year-olds received a timely health and development check, over two thirds of the providers visited had not seen the outcomes of these checks to enable a better transition to a new setting.’

The Pupil Premium presents an opportunity to narrow the language gap between disadvantaged children and their peers, both in early-years settings and schools. Ofsted (2016) observe that in early-years settings using the premium successfully, ‘the strategies … focused on improving children’s personal, social and emotional development and their speech, language and communication skills’.

For primary and secondary schools there are both opportunities and issues for school-aged children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) in teacher professional development, the curriculum, and assessment. The 2016 ‘Framework of Core Content for Initial Teacher Training’ includes language and communication only in relation to Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND). The 2011 teacher professional standards remain in place, however, with their requirement that all teachers are able to promote ‘articulacy’.

The current National Curriculum has a clear statement on the importance of spoken language; the word ‘discussion’ (or others which are similar) crops up in the statutory curriculum requirements over seventy times, and recent national reading tests at age 11 place great importance on children’s comprehension of subtle nuances of vocabulary. However, speaking and listening is no longer a discrete curriculum area with its own defined age progression. Assessment of language skills is confined to the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile; the removal of the speaking and listening assessment from the overall GCSE English grade effectively tells teachers and young people these skills are not important. The need to have written work in children’s books so as to demonstrate pupil progress for Ofsted, moreover, deters schools from focusing on spoken language.

When we come to accountability, the current Ofsted common inspection framework (unlike its predecessor) makes no mention of communication skills. The 2016 Handbook for Inspection of Schools is more helpful, mentioning oral communication specifically as a component of literacy, and including it in grade descriptors for teaching, learning and assessment, where to achieve an outstanding judgement teachers will need to ‘embed reading, writing and communication and, where appropriate, mathematics exceptionally well across the curriculum’.

Across the age range, the implementation of the 2014 SEND reforms has brought many benefits to children and young people with SLCN and their families, notably the opportunity to become involved in service review and design, and take the lead in planning for their own future. The focus in the SEND reforms on quality first teaching in classrooms and class teacher responsibility for intervention programmes is also likely to improve the learning for those with SLCN. Most importantly, the emphasis on joint working across health and education should be of particular value for children who can so easily fall between the cracks of the overlap between these agencies’ responsibilities.

Head teacher surveys, however, have found that few leaders believe that new joint working arrangements between schools and outside services are working well (The Key, 2016). Many schools report limited access to speech and language therapists (SLTs). And a recent Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) survey of members’ experience of delivering the SEND reforms (Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, 2017) reported several major challenges, including a change in the focus of SLT resource to support children and young people with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), which has often been to the detriment of those without plans, and varied and inconsistent joint commissioning arrangements between health, education and social care.

A positive, however, is the Joint Ofsted/CQC Framework for the inspection of local areas’ effectiveness in identifying and meeting the needs of children and young people with SEND. These inspections are proving a powerful force for improvement, encouraging local areas to self-evaluate how well they are identifying needs (including SLCN), meeting the needs, and improving outcomes. Already there have been a number of references to speech, language and communication (SLC) services in reports, noting both strengths and weaknesses in provision and prompting a renewed focus on joint commissioning.

Austerity cannot but be a dominant element of the current landscape in local structures and services. Whether it be in local authorities, where there has been a reduction in specialist SLCN advisory teacher posts and a 30–40 per cent reduction in the numbers of Children’s Centres, or in the NHS, there are simply fewer skilled people employed to meet children’s needs.

Nevertheless, the overwhelming positive factor in the current landscape for SLCN is the energy and passion for the issue in the sector. Despite curriculum pressures, more than 5700 schools registered this year to take part in the Communication Trust’s ‘No Pens Day Wednesday’ (see chapter 5) – nearly a quarter of all the schools in England. We have new campaigns, such as RALLI (now RADLD), launched in 2012 to raise awareness of language disorder, the 2018 ‘Bercow Ten Years On’ review led by ICAN and the RCSLT, and a resurgence in the awareness of whole-school approaches through the University of Cambridge Oracy Centre and national Oracy Network (an alliance of schools, educational charities and academic bodies) dedicated to fostering oracy skills.

Supported by DfE funding, voluntary organisations concerned with speech, language and communication have developed new assessment tools for language in settings and schools, new intervention programmes and a range of professional development resources for practitioners. Research on language is thriving, too; the Economic and Social Research Council have funded a large-scale, long-term research programme on children’s language (LuCiD), while the Early Intervention Foundation and the Education Endowment Foundation are both evaluating a range of language-based interventions to improve children’s outcomes.

Technology and the digital revolution, too, are leading to innovation across the sector. We are seeing developments in teletherapy, in which some schools can now access a service which provides real-time audio and vi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• How to use this book
• 1 Speech, language and communication – a growing issue
• 2 What do we know about how to support language development?
• 3 Stories from schools and settings
• 4 A place to talk
• 5 A reason to talk
• 6 Teaching talk
• 7 Support for talk
• 8 Working with parents and carers to develop their children’s language skills
• 9 Supporting children with more severe needs
• References
• Index