In this week's podcast Dale Pickles from B Squared is joined by Wendy Lee to discuss how schools can support pupils in Early Years settings with Speech, Language and Communication Needs (SLCN).

With many children are starting school with poor speech, language and communication skills, more needs to be done to support them. There is strong evidence around prevalence, with numbers rising to over 50% of all children in areas of social deprivation having poor language that impacts on wider development.

The impact of poor understanding, limited vocabulary, poor sentence and narrative skills can have wide reaching and long-term impact, not just through primary education, but through secondary school and beyond. The early years is the first port of call for many of these children and early years teachers and practitioners can go some way to identifying needs and supporting language development.

Useful Links

Education Endowment Fund (EEF) – Early Language Development

https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/evidence-summaries/evidence-reviews/early-language/

Education Endowment Fund (EEF) – Preparing for Literacy

https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/tools/guidance-reports/preparing-for-literacy/

The Communication Trust – Online CPD

https://www.thecommunicationtrust.org.uk/projects/professional-development/online-short-course/

The Communication Trust - Supporting Children and Young People's Speech, Language and Communication online training

http://www.platform3online.org.uk/index.html

The Communication Trust – Talking Point

https://www.thecommunicationtrust.org.uk/projects/talking-point/

Lingo Speech – Products and resources to support SLCN

https://www.lingospeech.co.uk/resources/

Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) – Language as a wellbeing indicator

https://www.eif.org.uk/report/language-as-a-child-wellbeing-indicator

For more podcast episodes from the SENDcast click below… https://www.thesendcast.com/sendcast-episodes/