UK children's speech therapy cuts - Warning!

In an exclusive interview with The Independent , Ms Gross said parents needed more information about children’s speech development arguing that many families were still unaware how to help their youngsters.

She called for parents to be offered information via smart phones and social networking sites, saying parents were willing to make dramatic changes to their lifestyles once the dangers of their children’s excessive television viewing or dummy use were explained to them.

In her final report, Two Years On, Ms Gross warns that the improvements made in children’s speech during 2011, the national year of communication, risk being overturned because of the “significant cuts” to front-line services.

The cuts come as levels of communication problems identified in children continue to rise, with a 58 per cent growth in numbers of pupils with communication as their primary special need over the last five years.

Ms Gross told The Independent her visits to 105 out of 152 local authorities during her two years in the job had made her “very worried” about the effect of the cuts on children with communication problems.

Ms Gross said she feared that children would face significantly longer waits to see speech and language therapists for assessment. She said: “If you are three and have to wait around 18 months to be seen then it is going to be much harder to catch up. If children can have help and catch up by the time they are five and a half then there progress should be normal from then on. But research shows that a child whose problem persists after five and a half will struggle.”

Ms Gross was appointed the Government’s communication champion in January 2010 in order to boost awareness of the importance of developing children’s communication skills.

Dyslexia: Supporting vocabulary and language skills

Children with literacy difficulties often have associated word retrieval difficulties, which present as a weakness in finding/retrieving words from memory and then saying the word.

As a consequence, children may misname words and stumble while talking, as they try to retrieve a word. This therefore affects their sentence organisation and clarity.

Improving word retrieval skills will help to develop sentence organisation and, therefore, expressive language skills.

This will also help to encourage confidence in communication, and language skills will, as a result, be addressed and developed alongside classroom literacy skills. There are several strategies that can be used to support word retrieval skills:

• teaching children vocabulary within word groups, such as transport, animals and clothing. These word groups can be divided further into their individual subdivisions for older children in KS 2 and upwards. For example, land transport, sea animals and winter clothing
• describing vocabulary to help a child learn all the different features and parts of a word. Think of this as making a map of a word. When a child recalls one part of their selected word map, it may help them to recall the connecting parts of the map. When practising descriptions, it is helpful for the child to follow a given structure; for example: 1) name the group/category, 2) where you see it, 3) what it does, 4) what you use it for, 5) the size, 6) the colour and 7) the initial sound of the word. This structure can be adapted as necessary
• helping children visualise words as an aid to focusing on a vocabulary topic. This process accesses and uses visual memory as a primary source of recall. You can support this visualisation for vocabulary naming as follows: “I’m at the supermarket; I see some oranges. What do you see next to the oranges?”
• using a kinaesthetic approach to learning (employing lots of gesture and movement when talking about words). This can be particularly useful as movement helps to support memory. For example, if you are playing a describing game, you can use gesture or movement to discuss how you use an object, the size of an object and its shape. Often when a child cannot immediately recall a word, acting out the word triggers their verbal memory of that word.

It is essential to mix up strategies so therapy remains fresh and interesting. It is also important for a child to have a variety of different strategies to rely on.

Read more at SEN magazine

Medical device aids speech therapy

One out of every 15 kids has a speech impediment. When a toddler says “wabbit” instead of “rabbit,” it may be cute, but as the child grows older, it can be the source of cruel taunts and teasing.

What’s more, conventional speech therapy can take months and may never completely fix the problem. But now a new device arms therapists with a set of tools that can correct the problem with unprecedented precision and speed.

Speech Therapy and Autism: Behaviour and Criteria

A child going to undergo speech therapy with the diagnosis of autism has to pass a criteria of characteristics. Here are the main criteria for a child to be diagnosed.

Criteria 1: Social Interaction
The child has to have a verifiable social interaction impairment. This impairment should be manifested by at least two of following behaviours:

1.Non-verbal behaviours like quirky body posture, eye stare/gaze, facial expressions and others.
2.Failure to develop peer relationships that are appropriate for their development age like making friends or relating to other children through sheer disinterest. The lack of emotional reciprocity falls in this category.

3.Lacking the will to share emotions and thoughts. The child doesn’t usually point to objects of interest and it is up to others to read or understand what the child is interested in.

Criteria 2: Communication
The child has a communication impairment with one of the following conditions:

1.Delay or total lack of spoken language development. This includes lack of expressive language, like hand gestures and facial expressions.

2.Where the child has adequate speech, they cannot initiate a conversation or even sustain one with other people.

3.Repetitive or stereotyped use of language, commonly known as idiosyncratic language, this is where what the child keeps saying is meaningless whether the word(s) exist or not.

4.Lack of imaginative or make-believe play. Play is a major distinction for children with autism. Their play is not influenced with social signals and social adaptations from the surrounding. Since play is a major factor in language development, this is important.

Criteria 3: Repetitive And Stereotype Behaviour Patterns
Autistic children manifest repetitive behaviour, and this criteria is judged by having at least one of the following conditions.

1.An encompassing preoccupation with one or more restricted patterns of interest that seem abnormal, like focusing on a trivial object e.g. a rotating fan all day long.

2.An abnormal affection for repetitive routines and rituals. These may be normal routines with a bunch of alternatives but the child always follows the same routine and is agitated by other options or possibilities, many times to the point of throwing tantrums .

3.Repetitive body mannerisms like finger twisting or complex body postures.

4.Preoccupation with small object like screws, buttons or other miniature details.

Summary
Autistic diagonsis is standardised and the above are the criteria needed to issue a positive diagnosis.

All speech therapist that deal with autistic children require that any autistic child be properly diagnosed as autistic, before they can start speech therapy sessions.

As you may expect, these sessions tend to be even more specialised, with totally different goals and timeframes compared to sessions for non autistic toddlers.