Speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) are increasing in school-age children.

The latest government data shows SLCN are the primary need for 92,000 pupils with education, health and care plans (EHCPs) - making them the second most common need, after autism spectrum disorder, for this group.

Meanwhile, they are the primary need for a quarter of children with special educational needs (SEN) support (304,000) - the most common need for this group.

In addition, there is an increasing number of children with SLCN who aren’t recorded as having special educational needs and disabilities, taking the total number of children who find it a challenge to talk and understand words to over 2 million, according to the charity Speech and Language UK.

Given that unmet SLCN are associated with further challenges, including poor behaviour and mental health concerns, it has never been more important for schools to be equipped to proactively meet these needs. But what does a proactive approach to supporting children with SLCN look like?

“Everything we do around the therapeutic needs of our young people sits on top of the curriculum,” says Jenny McConnell, principal of Dawn House School in Nottinghamshire, a specialist setting for children with SLCN aged 5-19, which is run by Speech and Language UK.

It helps that McConnell herself has a background in speech and language therapy. “There aren’t many speech and language therapists who run schools,” she points out.

The school’s teachers, however, are subject specialists, rather than speech and language specialists. They work alongside 11 dedicated speech and language therapists (SLTs), as well as a team of occupational therapists.

Blank Levels

When pupils join Dawn House, the SLTs assess them to build a thorough profile of their SLCN and learning abilities. This allows them to find the right class fit for each pupil, as classes are organised according to ability rather than age.

Part of the assessment process also involves assigning each pupil a Blank Level, based on a model established by researchers in 1978. The level refers to the complexity of questioning that a child understands. For example, a level 1 question might be: “What did you see?”, while a level 4 question might be: “What will happen if…?”

Of course, pitching lessons at the right Blank Level is essential if pupils are to follow the curriculum. Ben Norman, Dawn House’s deputy principal, says that to aid teachers’ memories, a list of “the name, class and Blank Level” for every pupil is kept in each classroom.

But, says Neil Maslen, director of education at Speech and Language UK, while “on the face of it, it looks quite simple, it’s actually quite complicated” for a teacher to ensure that they are always using the correct Blank Level for each student, which is why they engage in regular training to keep their Blank Level technique up to scratch. Meanwhile, SLTs observe lessons and feed back to teachers on how well they adhere to the levels required by the class in front of them.

Collaboration with therapists

At Dawn House, SLTs carry out focused interventions with pupils one-on-one or in small groups outside of lesson time. They also work with teachers to support them in planning lessons, something Norman says is possible because “we give teachers a period of additional PPA [planning, preparation and assessment] a week, which we call ‘therapy collaboration’”.

Sarah Throup, an SLT at the school, explains that each teacher works with an SLT “buddy” for a term at a time, using their extra PPA time to meet and talk through their upcoming lessons.

“We sit with teachers while they are planning their lessons, and look at the children that will be in that classroom, and ask, ‘Will they be able to access that concept? How might we support a teacher to think about the content of a lesson? Are they trying to pack too much in? Do they need to slow down the pace at which they’re delivering it and give a bit more thinking time? Can they put some visual support in place so the children aren’t only hearing the language, they’re also seeing something or experiencing something?’”

A key part of this is focusing on vocabulary, with SLTs working with teachers to standardise language across subjects so that pupils have an accurate understanding of the words they will need across the curriculum.

Standardising definitions

Lauren Henlor, the school’s assistant principal and a teacher of science, explains that this is particularly helpful in her subject. “In GCSE biology, you learn more words than you do in GCSE French!” she says, so it’s not surprising that students with SLCN might find it challenging to understand it all.

She adds that standardising definitions is especially important for abstract concepts, such as energy, “so that children can understand what we’re talking about. Because if you can’t even see it, can’t hear it, how do you know it’s real?”

Meanwhile, Maslen says, in maths, “it’s really confusing for our children” if teachers use “subtract, minus, take away and remove” interchangeably. Instead, having “one word we use for a particular action” - across all subjects - helps pupils to better understand concepts.

This might feel counterintuitive, adds McConnell, because teachers often think “if I describe it in a different way each time, they’ll gradually get it”.

“But that doesn’t work for our children,” she says. “You need to stick with what you’re saying and maybe reduce some of the words in that sentence, maybe write it down, maybe make it visual.”

A focus on vocabulary

In fact, Throup and her colleague Michelle Smith, lead practitioner at the school, have undertaken a maths research project alongside academics at the University of Sheffield that has shown just how valuable this focus on vocabulary is.

They measured the progress of a GCSE maths class after introducing a starter activity that involved breaking words down to look at their roots, such as the meaning of “kilo” in “kilogram”.

“What we found is that when we really focus on the vocabulary and ensure that young people understand the language, their progress increases,” says Smith, adding that the research revealed that students had “lots of misconceptions around words, even words that we thought were relatively simple”.

For example, when asked whether they could put the word “sequence” into a sentence, it became apparent that many students “were talking about something sparkly. They were thinking we were talking about ‘sequins’”, Smith explains.

‘When we really focus on the vocabulary and ensure that young people understand the language, their progress increases’

It made the school realise that “before we teach anything, they’ve got to know the words”, she says, explaining that this pre-learning is now delivered during class time by the subject teacher.

And while, at first, some teachers were “quite worried that the block of [subject] learning they wanted to do wasn’t going to get done” because of the time dedicated to pre-learning vocabulary, “at the end the [pupils’] progress was the same or better, because the level of understanding was there from the start”.

The approach has also sparked a new “curiosity” in some of the pupils, adds Smith, recalling how “some of the older boys got quite fascinated by Latin, because a lot of the root words are Latin”.

This was a particular highlight, says Throup, because “for speech and language therapists, engagement can be a real challenge for teenagers, particularly key stage 4”.

She adds that, historically, SLTs would have taken children out in small groups to pre-teach vocabulary for the next week. “But then I might have pre-taught them a little bit wrong, because I’m not a maths teacher,” she says. “So it needs the subject specialist knowledge of the teacher” alongside the SLT’s therapeutic expertise.

This collaboration is at the heart of the school’s practice, says Maslen. “Our teachers are better teachers because of the work they do with speech and language therapists, and our speech and language therapists are better speech and language therapists because of the work they do with teachers.”

Upskilling classroom teachers

Of course, a typical mainstream school doesn’t have such consistent access to speech and language expertise, with NHS therapists - where they are available at all - travelling into schools to work with individual pupils, rather than being based full-time in education settings.

But even a one-off collaborative meeting between a teacher and an SLT can “upskill” a teacher, says McConnell. “That should mean that, moving forward, they’ve got that skill and knowledge themselves to be able to do it without necessarily needing the speech and language therapist,” she adds.

After all, many of the core approaches used at Dawn House - being aware of Blank Levels, pre-teaching vocabulary and standardising definitions - could easily be applied by teachers in mainstream settings once they have learned to use them, especially if the school is also able to ringfence some PPA time to help consolidate this work.

“Once you’ve been through that cycle, you don’t need to have somebody holding your hand all the way through,” says Smith.

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