Mary Hare Primary School has two Speech & Language Therapists who work closely with school staff to promote optimum progress in spoken language development for all the children.

 

Each child is allocated a lead therapist who is responsible for speech and language intervention and advice. The lead therapist also provides a detailed report for the child’s annual review.

Each child’s speech and language skills are assessed annually or according to the child’s needs.   Standardised assessments are used to assess most children to monitor progress. Assessment may also take the form of observation in group settings or structured language tasks designed to be appropriate to the age and needs of each child, used in conjunction with the class teacher’s observations. 

Information from assessments helps us to identify a list of speech and language therapy targets for each child. Targets are also set in conjunction with class teachers. Approximately five targets are set for each child at the beginning of every term and progress is evaluated at the end of term. Targets are sent home to parents at the beginning of each term.

Children usually receive two 20-minute individual speech and language therapy sessions and one 30-minute group session each week, depending on their profile. Therapy programmes may take the form of:

This is conversation with the child’s language level clearly in mind, often using the medium of a picture book as a shared focus to promote listening, understanding and expressive language skills and speech.

With the child’s profile of strengths and weaknesses identified from assessment, specific programmes of speech and language activities may be devised to give the child the foundation skills that they need.

These are a way to consolidate and generalise skills and promote the social use of language (e.g. making eye contact and turn-taking).

These help to make effective language learning part of the child’s everyday experience.

All children have a Speech & Language Folder which contains work done in therapy sessions. Comments on the child’s progress and ideas for home activities are written in this folder.

The Speech & Language Therapists are available to meet with parents as required. This could be regarding their child’s speech and language development, how to reinforce speech and language skills at home, and/or to observe a therapy session.

The Speech & Language Therapists liaise closely with colleagues from outside agencies (e.g. Cochlear Implant Programmes, Educational Psychologists) and welcome input into the children’s programmes.