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Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust’s Early Intervention Speech and Language Team was commissioned by Small Steps Big Changes to provide speech and language services to help meet needs in four ethnically diverse wards in the city.
Nearly 40 per cent of children in Nottingham do not reach the expected level in communication, language and literacy areas of learning in Reception year. Many children in the four wards are raised in multilingual environments and some families have limited or no proficiency in English. The team focuses on dispelling the myths around multilingualism and English as an additional language in terms of children’s language development among both families and professionals.
They target families with children aged from nine months to four years old so that support is available at the earliest opportunity, and use group and at-home interventions to support children’s language and communication development.
A qualified speech and language therapist delivers an adult course, with each of the six weekly two-hour sessions teaching strategies and activities that support children’s speech, language and communication. Parents and carers are encouraged to share ideas, take home a play activity each week, and work towards a target for their child’s communication skills during the course. Successful completion of the course, workbook and homework tasks results in a Level 1 qualification.
The team are increasing awareness of the services they offer by attending playgroups to link directly with local communities and liaising with health visitors and Early Help services to ensure that practitioners are promoting the speech, language and communication services to families.
They routinely collaborate with interpreters to aid communication with parents and caregivers who speak limited or no English, as well as to support children’s development in all their home languages.
The language-inclusive approach also includes working with multilingual speech and language therapy practitioners to deliver courses in other languages, using a translation functionality on the service website to provide information and translating the most used leaflets and resources into Romanian, Polish, Urdu and Arabic. It means that they are successfully engaging with many multilingual families; for example, 289 children have participated in a Home Talk programme, with 142 of them recorded as multilingual.
The aim is also to include fathers and co-parents from the start of interventions, with fathers outnumbering mothers in one of the course’s cohorts.
FINALISTS
• Early Inspirations – Manchester
• SEND Support Team – Kids Planet Day Nurseries
• Smallville Nursery – Kent
• South Acton Nursery School and Children’s Centre – London
CRITERION
Open to settings, services or projects that promote equality of opportunity and the best outcomes for all children, families and staff regardless of ethnic origin, special needs, background or disadvantage.