Plan / Do
Detailed assessment will provide the necessary information to plan a support package which may consist of further adjustments in the classroom to improve access to the curriculum and/or specific intervention to improve speech and language skills that need addressed.
Resources to support planning and resources to support interventions are available. Further resources are available from the Communication Trust , NAPLIC, I CAN.
An intervention needs to be planned and documented in order for all adults to be informed of the support that needs to be in place to support the young persons speech and language skills. A pupil passport or one page profile would be a useful way to share this information.
The young person should be identified as requiring SEN support
The additional support may include:
- Support in the classroom
- Adult instruction may need to be reduced and divided into manageable chunks to aid understanding
- Instructions may need to be reinforced individually
- Young people need to be asked to repeat the instruction to clarify understanding
- Pre- and post-teaching of key vocabulary may be beneficial
- Personalised word banks may be required to reinforce vocabulary
- More time to process information and organise a response may be needed
- Visual timetable and/ or task organisers to aid understanding (visit the twinkl website for free examples)
- Some young people may require an augmentative language system such as signs and/or symbols (e.g. WIDGIT) to encourage understanding and speech
- Group intervention may be needed and use interventions such as:
- Social Use of Language Programme
- Time to Talk is a programme for 4-6 year old and can be used in the whole class, in groups or individually with young people to develop language skills
- Talking frames
- Lego Therapy
- Cued Articulation
- Groups to encourage peer listening, turn-taking and questioning.
- Communication Leaders
- Individual intervention
Ongoing review may conclude that individual intervention is needed to improve specific skills, for example vocabulary, speech sounds etc that are not progressing despite further class and group support
Depending on the level of need and developmental history, a Speech and Language Therapist may also be involved in supporting the young people. If so, room needs to be available in school for assessment and intervention work
Advice from the SALT needs to be implemented in school by school staff and needs to follow some key principles if learning specific language skills within individual intervention:
- Structured teaching in line with the Instructional Hierarchy
- Daily structured teaching of one skill at a time
- Distributed practice (daily opportunities to practice targeted skills)
- Teaching most useful and transferable skills
- Teaching skills in different contexts to increase generalisation
- Use of direct instruction to explicitly teach targeted skills
- Assessing and teaching to enable fluency not just accuracy
- Learning is interleaved (new learning is explicitly mixed with old learning to aid understanding and minimise forgetting)
- The young person understands the purpose of any intervention and are fully informed about their progress
- More information about effective language interventions can be found on the Communication Trust 'What Works' database.