Half of boys aren't ready for school and they're not catching up

This article caught my eye today, the research featured backs up another London University study which showed that poor language skills at aged 7 was a good predictor of later socio-economic well being... a very scary but real link! This one associates it with an even more blighted future too:

By Stephen Adams 6:30AM GMT 11 Feb 2011 The Daily Telegraph

Statistics from the Department for Education show that 53 per cent of boys have not reached a "good level of development" by five, compared to 35 per cent of girls. Combined, the figure is 44 per cent.

Children are assessed by teachers to see if they can carry out basic skills like writing their name and reciting letters of the alphabet.

Yesterday, a leading public health adviser warned that the life-long impact of failing to reach this earliest of grades was "horrendous".

Sir Michael Marmot, professor of public health at University College London, said: "Only about 50 per cent of children are rated by their teachers as having achieved a good level of development by the age of five.

"You know what that means? Poorer level of early school development; poorer performance at every school stage; lower status; living in a poor area.

"It all starts at the beginning of life and works through the life course. This is horrendous really."

Those who failed at school also tend to live shorter lives that are blighted earlier by disability.

A year ago Sir Michael unveiled a review, called Fair Society, Healthy Lives, into how to even out the differences in people's health across geographical areas and social classes.

Giving pre-school children "the best start in life" was the highest priority recommendation, as targeting them has the biggest effect.

Sir Michael proposed increasing spending on this age group with measures such as "more parenting support programmes, a well-trained early years work force and high quality early years care".

The work we are doing at Small Talk Speech & Language Therapy and Smart Talkers pre-school groups is all aimed to address these issues.  We have a comprehensive package of programmes and activities to train staff by demonstration, help parents and above all share examples of good practise to benefit the children. For more about us www.private-speech-therapy.co.uk and www.smarttalkers.org.uk.

or ring 0844 704 5888

Related articles

• Half of boys failing at school by five (telegraph.co.uk)
• Pre-schoolers 'still ahead at 15' (bbc.co.uk)
• Almost half of boys falling behind in school at five, research reveals (dailymail.co.uk)
• Child development concerns raised (bbc.co.uk)
• 60% of poorest children fail to reach good level of behaviour, says study (guardian.co.uk)

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All good things must come to an end

We keep hearing about the demise of the Children's Centres but the truth is we don't really know what is going to happen yet. One thing is for certain, the needs that they addressed have not gone away and will still need massive input. Unfortunately, it is certain that the Community and Learning partnerships will cease to exist from the end of March. They are attempting to put action plans in place to keep the core services for another 12 months which I think it's a tall order for people who are not going to be around to see the outcome of their plans.


It was with great respect & admiration that I listened to Amanda Newbold, the C& LP co-ordinator from Lichfield on Monday afternoon. Instead of moaning about the end, regretting she couldn't do more or worrying about what she was going to do after April 1st, she has embraced the situation and wanted to celebrate the successes that they achieved. As she pointed out, they have 'had a ball', giving over a  million pounds to causes which have helped families and young children in the Lichfield area alone.


There have been great successes with the International Womens Groups, Bounce and Rhyme from the library services, a mobile skate park, young people's groups, family support.... and of course the projects that they have funded from Small Talk Speech and Language Therapy. We have done training with the child-minders, long-term Teeny Talker and Small Talker sessions, extra support for children with identified needs and signing sessions.


There was a lovely lunch and a surprise award ceremony. I was both gob smacked and delighted that we had one for 'outstanding' in the innovation category. I was going to show you a photograph of the award but as beautiful as it is, it's not a patch on this photo of the babies from my Baby Talk & Sign group!!

Aren't they gorgeous and aren't I lucky to have been able to work with lots of fantastic children and parents and then have an award as well!!!! I have really appreciated the opportunity to work in the Children's Centres and I know we have helped to make a difference.

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'Parents ARE to blame for many of the speech, language and communication delays' the headlines should have said!

Unfortunately, the press took the leading paragraph from the Hello press release literally (see our last blog post) and gave the parents the impression that it is OK to let your children watch TV for hours on end and that a lack of  interaction with your children has no bearing on their communication progress. Headlines such as 'TV not to blame', 'We cant blame parents' are both mis-leading and mis-guided. They actually had a negative effect rather than positive.


What the Hello campaign was alluding to, were the long term difficulties that around 7% of children will have. These are severe delays or disorders which happen through no fault of anyone, least of all the parents.


However, up to 50% of children in some areas do not have sufficient levels of spoken language to begin to learn written language as they start school. These difficulties can be transient so that they will improve with the right help. These families are definitely the cause of their delay. Children who are baby-sat by a screen, whether that be PC, computer or PS3. A lack of proper interaction with them means that children don't learn rules of conversation or social skills that go alongside. Studies have shown that babies do not become babbling by chance, if they are not communicated with, they wont try to practise using the sounds of language. Babies will even stop crying if no one responds when they do. A child won't learn vocabulary if they don't hear the words. The way we learn language is by being exposed to it repeatedly.


We are facing a crisis yet no-one seems to understand. I was hoping that the Hello campaign would hi-light the issues and promote good practise, yet January's theme was just that and I didn't see any headlines to that effect, did you? I can spend hours on this, my personal soap box topic, because it's something I believe is vitally important. What sort of society are we going to become if our communication skills are falling apart?

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Related articles

• Parents 'not guilty' over speech (bbc.co.uk)

Hello in February: Let's talk about long term speech & language difficulties

One in six parents in Britain believe that the most common cause of speech, language and communication
difficulties among children is the time they spend on computers and watching television, according to a new poll published today to mark the launch of the Hello campaign (www.hello.org.uk)– the national year of communication.


Over half of parents surveyed blamed speech, language and communication difficulties on parents not talking to their children enough. Nearly one in three parents said they were or had been concerned about their children’s communication skills. The OnePoll survey of 6,000 people, including 3,000 parents, was commissioned by the Hello campaign to explore perceptions about children’s speech and language development.  


The Hello campaign aims to make children and young people’s communication development a priority in homes, nurseries and schools across the country. It is run by The Communication Trust, a coalition of 40 organisations with expertise in speech, language and communication, in partnership with Communication Champion, Jean Gross. The campaign is backed by government and sponsored by BT and Pearson Assessment.


Speech, language and communication needs affect over 1 million children in the UK today: four out of five respondents underestimated the extent of these difficulties. Only one in five of the 6,000 people polled considered biological or genetic reasons to be a possible cause of speech, language and communication
needs. However, the Hello campaign says the exact cause of long term speech, language and communication needs is often unknown but can be attributed to biological as opposed to environmental factors.  


Jean Gross, England’s Communication Champion, said: “Public understanding of children’s communication difficulties remains worryingly low. The automatic response seems to be to blame parents or technology. This just isn’t right. We need to clear up the confusion and myths that exist around this subject. 10% of children – that’s two to three in every UK classroom – have some form of long term communication difficulty that can affect them early, severely and for life. Their brains don’t process language in quite the same way that other children’s brains do.  These results reinforce the need for the Hello campaign to radically improve understanding of speech, language and communication difficulties and the impact this has on children’s lives.”


The adults surveyed (48% of whom were parents of children under 5), exposed widespread lack of knowledge about children’s speech and language development. The poll found, for example, that parents and the general population know more about walking milestones than talking milestones.


8% of parents said they had been or were concerned that their children’s communication difficulties were significant, with a greater proportion of these in Northern Ireland (13%) and England (8.1%) than in Scotland (6.1%) and Wales (6%). One in seven of the general population say they wouldn’t have a clue when asked whether they would recognise a child with a speech, language and communication need. Most adults however could relate to the impact of communication difficulties. When asked how they themselves felt when they struggled to get a message across or got words muddled up, two thirds of adults felt frustrated or silly with only 9% saying it didn’t affect them.


Chris Pike, young person aged 17 with a communication difficulty, says; “The worst part of having a communication difficulty is being misunderstood; quite often the people around me don’t even realise I have these special needs. Parents and teachers clearly want to help me and others like me to develop and reach our full potential. However, the vast majority of people just don’t know the reality of struggling with a communication problem.


“It’s upsetting that many people might blame my problems on spending too much time in front of TV and computer screens. Communication difficulties come in a whole variety of different forms; sometimes they aren’t visible. I know the Hello campaign will change the way parents, teachers and young people view and understand communication problems. I really hope this will allow children and young people like myself to be recognised and understood, in the same way those with dyslexia and autism are.”


The Hello campaign will improve understanding and disseminate information on typical communication development, how to spot if children are struggling and where to go for help and support. 70% of survey respondents felt that more information on how children develop speech, language and communication
would be helpful, amongst parents this rose to 82%. Only 22% would ask parents, grandparents or friendsfor information on general communication development compared to 39% going to the internet.  The Hello campaign will also prompt tangible improvements for the 1.2 million children and young people in the UK, with some form of long‐term speech, language and communication needs. This means more support for parents and carers, earlier identification of difficulties and earlier, more appropriate, referral to specialist support such as speech & language therapy.

Related articles

• Parents 'not guilty' over speech (bbc.co.uk)
• Communication breakdown: Too much TV and not enough talk 'leads to speech problems in children' (dailymail.co.uk)

Speech & Language Therapists? What do they do again?

This article has been reprinted in many different places including Russia and India in the last 12 months. I thought I'd share it here:

In order for professionals from any field to work together well, it is vitally important that each one has at least a working knowledge of the other's role and ideally a little about their background. They need to understand what each can bring to the situation to help whatever task is on the table. There have been many studies and many projects on this topic. I wrote ‘Exactly what do they do’ for Special Children Magazine in 1994 which focussed on the results of a questionnaire. This really pointed to the fact that teachers didn’t really know what to expect from the Speech & Language Therapist. Having been out of the profession and working in industry for ten years, I assumed that the situation would have changed radically and improved beyond belief. However, in my day to day clinical work in schools and nurseries, I found the opposite to be true. The general opinion, I gathered, was that teachers do not realise what speech & language therapists do and how they can work together I decided, therefore, to look at the current situation in more depth.

The survey results revealed that we have been seen as very nice ladies who rush into nursery or school with folders, leave reams of paperwork and dash off, only to return weeks later to repeat the procedure. You can read the rest of the article at:

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/childhood-education-articles/speech-amp-language-therapists-exactly-what-do-they-do-1887035.html  I'd welcome your comments!

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January Podcast

We've had a fantastic start to the year, click 'play' to hear more......

 

Apologies for the variation in sound quality!

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Baby Talk.... let's celebrate it!

I had a lovely day yesterday, which included a mix of groups and individual clients. I enjoyed all of it but the hi-light of the day was a group of new mums and their babies. They were still at the stage where age is measured in weeks and the mums were still adapting to the enormous change to their lives while regularly swapping their various birthing stories.


The purpose of the session was to discuss 'Baby Talk' which is a series of sessions to go through important topics surrounding interaction and a baby's communication development. The first session looks at how old the baby should be before you start talking to him or her. All the mums there were adamant that it should be immediately. We discussed how new research has proved  what we suspected, that they must be able to hear before they are born. A new born can identify the voice of his mother, over others, immediately after birth according to new research from the US.


The reaction of these mothers was very refreshing! We don't run too many classes like this one unless they are commissioned by midwives or other health professionals as many feel that there's no point in talking to a baby 'as they wont talk for ages'. However, babies need to be talked to to trigger the area of the brain responsible for communication and also the centre for interaction, empathy and social skills. If they do not receive this in the first year then there are long term implications.


It is very worrying that many children today are not experiencing adequate interaction. I observed 6 young mothers last week with toddlers in pushchairs. I was waiting for a fiend who was running late so was parked at the side of a road in a housing estate.  I saw no interaction between mother and child whatsoever. 2 were texting, 1 was on the phone and the others had i-pod ear-pieces in! Where was the opportunity for communication there?


It not just a specific class problem as the Daily Telegraph reported last week that children of middle class families are suffering too from lack of attention by parents who are working longer hours.


The 2011 Hello Campaign aims to share with the general public how amazing human communication is and bring attention to what we should be doing. This month' s theme is don't take communication for granted and next month it will be all about the fact that 'babbling babies don't turn into talkative toddlers by chance, it requires help and encouragement'.


The Baby Talk sessions will celebrate this and we will discuss other issues such as the use of dummies, forwards facing push-chairs, nursery rhymes and TV watching. As I've said 100 times before, human communication is fantastic, fascinating, fabulous.... there are insufficient superlatives to describe it and yet we do take it for granted!!!