The signs of a speech and language crisis in schools are clear - and have been for some time.

In 2022-23, health visitor checks in England found almost 15 per cent of children aged 24 to 30 months were below the expected level in communication skills, up from 11 per cent in 2018.

The early years foundation stage profile for the same period found that around 20 per cent of children in England are not at the expected level of learning for communication and language and 30 per cent were not at the expected level for literacy by the end of Reception.

Speech and Language UK, meanwhile, has used YouGov surveys of teacher concerns to reach an estimate of 1.9 million young people currently struggling “to talk and understand words”.

The most common causation cited anecdotally is the lockdown periods of the Covid-19 pandemic, the narrative being that this is a blip that will work its way through the system.

There is some research evidence to support that theory, for example, research from Ireland into the lives of children born in the pandemic (now entering school) found that they may have a lag in communication skills due to meeting fewer people during lockdown.

However, there is also evidence of more long-term trends impacting speech and language. A recently published Australian paper explores the “techno-ference” of screens, finding that increased use of screens means toddlers hear fewer adult words, have fewer back-and-forth conversations with their parents and make fewer vocalisations.

A lack of evidence

It’s a complex picture, says Courtenay Norbury, professor of developmental language and communication disorders at University College London. She cautions that we currently don’t have “the kind of evidence that we would need” to even say for sure that things are worse now than it was pre-pandemic.

“A lot of the evidence is based on teacher reports or parent perception, and the challenge is that we hear in the media all the time that it was terrible for kids and they’re going to have loads of problems, so everybody’s primed to think that there are more problems now than there used to be,” she explains. “What we’d really ideally like to do is go out and test kids to see if there has been a fundamental change in language.”

It’s certainly not the case that there were no problems before the pandemic. A 2016 paper from Norbury and her colleagues reported that developmental language disorder (DLD) - a term for difficulties learning, producing and comprehending spoken language, which are not associated with another developmental condition - is “a common, but often undiagnosed, condition affecting 7.5 per cent of children at the start of primary school”.

Yet, only 3.8 per cent of pupils in England have speech, language and communication needs (SCLN) listed as their primary category of need. That’s because around 50 per cent of children that meet the criteria for DLD do not receive any special educational needs or disabilities (SEND) provision in their first year of school, Norbury explains, due to poor identification and diagnosis.

What happened to those children during the pandemic? Direct interventions from speech and language therapists - “which can make a really big difference”, Norbury says - were often inaccessible. And the loss of the everyday interaction of the classroom was, of course, hugely significant, both for young people with a biological tendency towards SCLN and others.

Whether that exacerbated problems so they were recognised more by teachers, rather than new cases being created - or both happened together - is difficult to gauge.

Louisa Reeves, director of policy and evidence at Speech and Language UK, leans towards the former explanation.

“What we are hearing from the researchers and the people on the ground working with these children is that Covid shone a light on an already existing situation,” she says. “People talk about a social gradient in terms of speech and language challenges, and we know that in areas of disadvantage, there were always more children struggling.

“Perhaps what Covid did was make that worse. So in those areas of disadvantage that were particularly impacted, instead of starting nursery and school a bit behind, they lost a lot of ground because the support mechanisms that have supported those families and those communities just fell away.”

Whatever the cause, the need for a solution is clear.

We know that those with SLCN are six times more likely to be behind in English and 11 times more likely to be behind in maths at age 11, with only 14 per cent gaining a 9-5 pass grade at GCSE in English and maths. Meanwhile, some 45 per cent of young people referred for mental health services have difficulties with language skills, along with 60 per cent of young offenders.

The foundation for education

Professor Charles Hulme, who recently retired as professor of psychology and education in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford, has long been a champion for the importance of language skills.

He was one of the developers of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) programme, a 20-week oral language intervention for children in nursery and Reception who show weakness in spoken language skills and are at risk of experiencing difficulty with reading.

The programme has been found to offer an additional four months’ progress in language skills to four- and five-year-olds who receive the intervention, and the UK government recently agreed to fund it in schools for a fifth year.

“Language is the foundation for the whole of formal education,” Hulme says. “If you can’t understand what people are saying to you, and if you can’t use language to express your own thoughts and feelings, you’re in real trouble in virtually any educational setting.”

He points to the fact that language difficulties are a common feature of many diagnosable neurodevelopmental conditions, including autism, intellectual disability and language disorder.

“I would say that when you’re talking about SEND, language is nearly always going to be a part of that, so language should be seen as a central aspect of provision for children with special educational needs, too.”

How late is too late to help children with SCLN? A common narrative is that earlier is better and, as such, much of the intervention focus has been on EYFS.

But the assumption that speech and language are primarily a concern of early years and key stage 1 is not the full picture, Hulme continues, referencing some recent work “evaluating a language intervention for older children aged 9-11, which showed very positive effects”.

“In an ideal world, the education system would be providing them with support to develop their language skills for quite an extended period of time through the primary school years,” he says.

Norbury agrees, but says interventions also need to happen in secondary schools, explaining that it is “terrifying how many kids go into secondary school with really limited language”.

“Some have the language and attainment of kids who are four years younger than they are,” she says. “And the expectations that we have of language are much higher for kids when they’re going into secondary school.”

There are more abstract words and concepts used, she explains, and the syntax becomes much more complicated in order to explain temporal and causal relationships between people and things, as well as more figurative expressions and a greater amount of reliance on inference.

“We’ve been really trying to push this message that, yes, early intervention is important, but you really have to think about a long-term plan, kind of like physical fitness. Nobody would expect that you do a 20-week exercise programme in Reception, and then you never have to worry about exercise again. It’s something that you have to build on.”

Securing support

But, at whatever age issues arise, how easy is it to identify the challenges? And who is best placed to intervene?

Teachers are generally “very good at picking up that the pupil may not be where they’re expected to be, but they don’t always think that it’s a language issue”, Norbury argues.

A language problem can be masked by issues with behaviour or problems with reading, she continues, meaning that the underlying cause might remain undetected for a long time.

“And schools are often, understandably, resource-led, and we know how hard it is to get hold of speech and language therapists. So there is the question of whether a speech and language issue is going to be severe enough to get support, so they may focus on something else where maybe the support might be more forthcoming.”

There is also an issue, though, that support may have previously been in place and then was withdrawn. This can particularly be the case for those identified in preschool, says Helen Pinnington, early years foundation lead at St Thomas More’s Catholic Primary School in Hampshire.

Pinnington says that by the time children arrive in Reception at her school, around 90 per cent of those with SLCN have already been identified.

“The problem is that they’ve already usually seen a speech and language therapist and been discharged,” she explains. “So it’s the parent that will tell me, or the nursery or preschool that they have come from. I think those children should still be under speech and language therapists, who, in an ideal world, should come in to give us a steer, to review the targets, to give us that little bit more specialist support for the TAs and the teachers.”

She recalls how, in previous decades, speech and language therapists would “come into school regularly” and explore difficulties, progress and targets, and offer suggestions.

“At the moment, the teachers and the TAs are picking that up and trying to do that as well as manage the class. Obviously, we’ve got skills in helping children with their speech and language and developing that, but we’re not specialist language therapists.”

The tools of technology

Some schools are turning to technology to help. Ben Greene, headteacher of Brotherton and Byram Community Primary Academy in West Yorkshire, explains that the school undertakes its own internal observational assessment within the first six weeks, in addition to the standard baseline assessment.

“We’re looking for the full 17 areas of learning [in the early learning goals], including communication, and we’re looking for children to be on track,” he explains. “Where they’re not on track, we start planning intervention around that, so for communication we’d screen them on WellComm.”

This software enables staff to get a “detailed analysis of where the language gap is”, as well as a programme of support for practitioners to work through, targeting areas including retention, listening, logical awareness and so on, he explains.

“What it doesn’t do is work like a speech therapist, so if a child does have an identified speech need, we would still refer it to an external service, but the waiting lists can be as long as 24 months.”

And so the school offers “quite a package of work” around communication, including spoken poetry and a singing curriculum alongside early phonics work and open days for parents and families to encourage links between school and home.

At Pinnington’s school, they are having some success with a cued articulation approach, in which hand gestures represent speech sounds, to help children with clearer pronunciation.

“We use it alongside our phonics, and we found that to be really effective, because often the speech and language therapists will give phonics as a strategy for children who’ve got delayed speech sound,” she says.

Impact on resources

The school previously used NELI, she continues, and found that it “really had an impact” on the children, but was simply too labour-intensive. In the programme, a TA works with between three and six children three times per week for 30 minutes, and so is away from the classroom during that time.

“We’d be struggling and stretching ourselves in the classroom, we just didn’t find it very manageable,” she continues.

Hulme, one of the developers of NELI, acknowledges the time demands, but says that “we’d argue that it’s a very, very good use of TA time to be doing the programme”.

“I guess it’s just a question of resources, and whether those resources can be devoted to delivering the programme, which is still incredibly good value for money.” But ideally, he says, schools should get funding to increase the availability of TAs to support with delivering NELI.

In these resource-strapped times, the key to effective SCLN intervention is “really careful planning”, says Pinnington.

“When you get your new cohort, you need to get a picture of that whole cohort to present to your Sendco and senior leadership team. What are the needs? What is the proportion of children with English as an additional language? What is the proportion of children who have difficulty with speech sounds?

“If possible, use one of those screening tools and work with your team to fine-tune and be really clear about exactly what the difficulties are, because then you can plan the appropriate support and really tailor that to those children.”

If schools find they have a significant number of children with SCLN, she advises to “push for an additional layer of TA support where possible”.

‘Stacking the support’

Looking to the future of addressing these needs, Norbury says there are important conversations to be had about putting a “bigger focus on oral language” in teacher training.

“It’s so important for every aspect of the curriculum,” she says. “We should be training teachers how to accommodate kids who have language and communication challenges, and giving them really concrete strategies.”

This includes elements such as prioritising repetition, breaking down instructions using visuals, and scaffolding tasks to make them easier in terms of the language used - so “really thinking about the language demands of this maths lesson or science lesson”, she says.

“I also really think that input from speech and language therapists on a more regular basis can really help teachers fine-tune their input for particular children, rather than just a blanket intervention that isn’t as tailored to individual needs. And these should be focused on areas where we know that there is going to be high need or where there is high risk, such as at points of transition.”

Referrals for specialist placements go up at points of transition, she explains, such as when moving to a new school or up to secondary, so policy should “really stack the support at those points of transition to make it as smooth as possible for kids”.

Reeves from Speech and Language UK says the desire for better teacher training around SCLN is clear.

“Over half of the teachers we surveyed said that they didn’t have enough training around speech and language,” she says. “When you’re training, you’re lucky if you get half a day on SEND in the round, let alone SCLN.”

But, she says, teachers really embrace that knowledge once they have it, as it is “another string to their bow”.

She adds: “You don’t go into teaching unless you’re a pretty good communicator, so it’s really just about having that opportunity to reflect on those skills and make them a bit more conscious. We’re not asking teachers to take on additional things. I think it can be framed in a way that supports what’s already being done.

“We need to look at how teachers acquire their teaching skills so that it includes support for spoken language and communication, and an understanding of how vitally important it is for all children and young people.”

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