10059466HEED: How do we engage hard to reach families in early childhood development.ClosedGrant for R&DInnovate UKOne in five children typically experiences some form of speech and language delay in early childhood. But long waiting lists, exacerbated by Covid, and a shortage of speech and language therapy (SLT) staff, means that many thousands of children are not receiving help when they need it. Speech problems are particularly acute among children experiencing poverty, including those in care/looked after. Like many other conditions, early intervention is key to addressing communication delays, and Kids Speech Labs are driving this is through digital technologies. Our remote screening and support solution is in use by NHS providers in the UK as a way of supplementing the current care pathway and delivering early screening and home-based intervention support while waiting for clinical appointments. It's well known that that children will respond faster to clinical intervention when supplemented by effective home-based intervention strategies. However we know that families can struggle to fit another thing into busy lives and we need to develop solutions that can meet the needs of families. The easier we make it to implement home-based engagement the less likely children are to have longer term impacts from speech, language and communication delays. In this project we want to do a deep dive into understanding how we can deliver a digital model of care and home/schools based strategies that can fit into the lives of families. Particularly those living in poverty and where English is not their first language. We will carry out workshops with families from our NSH partners to understand their experiences, needs and what they would like to see. We will prototype approaches to how we can support families at home and gather feedback on how useful, realistic they are. The project will bring together Speech and language therapists, families from a range of situations, digital health solution developers and user reserach experts to fundamentally rethink how we can support families and ensure all children can have the same access to supports at the earliest opportunity