Promoting the communicative participation of children with speech, language and communication needs

One child in ten has persistent difficulties producing speech sounds, understanding or using language, or following the social rules of conversation. These children often have extra help at school from teachers and assistants and from health professionals, such as speech and language therapists and psychologists. However, many children's needs go unrecognised and others do not get the right help at the right time. Children, their families and the professionals supporting them agree that the most important result of any input is that children communicate more easily and independently and use their communication skills to take part in activities at home, school and in their communities. But, children's progress is often measured by the sounds they say and the language they use and understand. Many interventions also focus on these narrow areas of communication. This project will bring together children with speech and language difficulties and parents with researchers and practitioners from education and health to drive research to promote children's successful everyday communication. It aims to help identify children with difficulties and make sure they get the right help at the right time so they are able to communicate what they want to, when they want to.

The new research network will cover the UK and Republic of Ireland. To make sure that children and parents are happy to express their views, groups will be set up specifically for them at the beginning of the project. Groups for parents in the UK and Ireland will be led by parents of children with speech and language difficulties. Groups for children will be led by experienced researchers. Group leaders will feedback knowledge, information and views from the parent and child groups to the wider research network. Experienced parent researchers will also provide support for members of the parent and child groups to help interested members join meetings of the wider network. Having the parent and child groups, along with the core research network, will allow us to gather the wider experience of children with a diverse range of speech, language and communication difficulties and their families.

In the first year the network will meet virtually every other month, with one final physical meeting planned for July 2021. The meetings will focus on:
1. Building a robust and sustainable network
2. Defining what successful daily communication entails for children from preschool to secondary school
3. Creating an information resource bank of the tools and interventions and expertise on children's communication skills in UK and Ireland
4. Deciding on priorities for research that can promote the development and evaluation of children's success in daily communication
5. Finding out how to link information collected in education, health and social care to evaluate long term influences on and impacts of communicative participation in UK and Ireland
6. Planning a large scale research project to address the most important gap in what we know about children's daily communication in the UK and Ireland
7. Identifying smaller-scale research projects for network subgroups

The network will help:
1. Children and their families by providing information to help set goals for children's communication with teachers and therapists and evaluate the success of intervention that is meaningful and important
2. Education and health professionals by providing a resource bank and new research on assessment and interventions
3. People who commission services by providing guidance on: how to measure the progress of children with speech and language difficulties, in terms of what is important to them and their families; which interventions meaningfully impact communication
4. Student professionals (teachers, speech and language therapists etc.) by highlighting long-term meaningful outcomes of interventions, and working collaboratively to mobilise research outputs and evidence