An early start for all

Speech and language therapist Emma Cahill describes how Newham's Early Start scheme benefits children, parents and therapists alike in an article in Bulletin, the magazine of the Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists. Following is an extract.

Between 1999 and 2003, eight Sure Start programmes commenced in Newham, London, each consisting of a core Sure Start team.In 2004, the council-led Early Years service and Sure Start merged to become 'Early Start'. Each programme's boundaries were extended so that the whole of Newham became 'Sure Start'.

Early Start works with families and children up to the age of five, as opposed to four in Sure Start. Early Start also inputs into the increasing number of children's centres. The Early Start speech and language therapy (ESSLT) national targets are the same as those for Sure Start, that is to work towards reducing the number of children whose speech and language is delayed at ages two and four.

The ESSLT service runs several groups over all eight Early Start programmes. These are mainly run by SLTs and/or SLTAs, although some groups are run jointly with the community nutrition service and/or counselling psychologists. The aim of the ESSLT groups is to give parents/carers modelled ideas of activities to support and to promote their child's speech and language development.

We encourage families to practise the skills during the group sessions, to give them greater confidence when transferring the skills to the home setting. Groups run for five to six weeks, and include baby groups for under ones; active groups for two-and-a-half to five-year-olds; creative groups for the 0 to fives; baby massage and parent/child interaction groups. We arrange crèches as necessary.

We evaluate the groups using pre- and post-group questionnaires with parents/carers. Items in both questionnaires include 'How often do you do activities at home that may help your child's talking?', 'How confident do you feel doing activities that may help your child's talking?', 'Can you give three examples of activities/games to do at home with your child that may benefit their talking?'. We also added 'How do you think this group has helped your child in the following areas?' to the post-group evaluation. [The areas listed are confidence, talking, eye contact, singing nursery rhymes, concentration, copying me talk, copying me play, signing.].

The figures show that parents/carers feel that following the group sessions they do more activities at home to support and encourage their child's communication. This may be partly due to their having a better understanding of positive communication and realising that much of what they are doing already is helping their children's talking, eg, singing nursery rhymes, looking at books together, commenting on what their child is doing.

We can also see that parents/carers feel more confident doing these activities at home, which we feel is at least partly due to the ESSLT team's support and encouragement in getting the parents involved in all the activities. The outcome for parents/carers' ideas for activities did not change as much. This is probably due to their becoming more aware that many activities they do at home already benefit their child's talking, eg, talking to them at mealtimes and singing songs, etc. A high percentage of parents/carers felt their child has shown some or a lot of improvement in all of the areas, especially in confidence and talking.

These are extremely positive results for the ESSLT team, as they show we are making a difference to children's speech and language as well as supporting parents/carers at home.

(Extracted from an article in RCSLT Bulletin, July 2006)