Sleepwalking into a disaster with SEN

[IanCurtisdancing]

DD was referred for speech therapy by the HV in September 2022. She waited 8 months for the assessment in April 2023, and then finally, we began our course of NHS SALT therapy today. A waitlist time of 18 months,

What an absolute fucking shambles.

A teams meeting with seven other mums and two SALT co-ordinators. They didnt have strong enough internet connection, they couldnt share the screen for the PowerPoint, they couldn't get the videos to play, couldn't get the audio to work.

It was 60 minutes of 'Sorry, can you see that? Sorry, is it playing?'

Each of our children are at different points with their development so there was nothing in common they could really cover.

We now get 4 sessions with a speech therapist and then that's it. Good luck kids. Off you go.

18 months fucking wait for this.

We are fortunate, we can scramble together some money to pay for some more private therapy but its fucking expensive. What about all the other kids? This is all they get?

Are we now sleepwalking into another educational disaster where there is not enough funding for early intervention and we will see more and more children struggle in the mainstream, more and more absence, and then the knock on effect as they reach adulthood?

Why the fuck do we not invest in our children?

AIBU to think that we need a radical change to stop us sleepwalking into a disaster?

We got sent to a Language and Play group. My son had NO language. They had a lot of play activities set up which was nice, but nothing that I didn't have at home. They knew I was a primary school teacher. The young woman running it told me to "turn my mobile phone off for ten minutes a day and really concentrate on talking with your child". I went home and cried - that was all the help they offered.

We had private speech therapy with ABA and it was amazing.

We had one meeting during which my child didn’t speak a word and we were discharged immediately and pushed back onto the school. Apparently ‘that's just how we do things now’. No offer of any therapy sessions. Absolute fucking joke

My son has a genetic disorder and joined the wait list in August 2021. His initial assessment was in December 2023 and the intervention is.......me sending them 10 minutes of video over email and then one teams call for them to talk through it and give me pointers on how to talk to him. There is no private availability here either and it's a total shambles

YANBU but equally there seems to have been a phenomenal rise in children with additional needs or needing support services, so it isn’t very surprising that they simply cannot keep up. This is of course alongside the usual cuts and Tory decimation. But the level of need has just rocketed. I’ll see if I can find the article I was reading the other day.

We have long disappeared into an educational disaster as far as SEN is concerned - the situation is catastrophic for families who can’t pay and even for those who can pay for initial assessments the provision to meet these needs is almost non existent in many areas. It’s utterly devastating.

There really needs to be massive increase in the number of therapists.
In my LA all of the SaLTs time is pretty much taken up doing neeeds assessments as these are statutory. Plus the annual reviews.
It then means the needs assessed can never be supported as there is noone to do it.
It must be frustrating for the SaLTs too.

When I refer for SALT assessments, we are told not to even bother contacting them again for at least 4 months to chase up appointments. They then phone the parents once, if they don't get a reply the child is discharged and we have to start again.
Once we do get an appointment, it is a video assessment. How on earth they can assess a 4 year old via video when they are generally hiding under a table or some such, i dont know. Then we are sent some generic activities to do and discharged. I can't remember the last time we saw a SALT therapist ( except for once for a profoundly deaf child with no speech, they came in once, wrote a report and then told us to get on with it!)

https://news.sky.com/story/amp/highest-number-of-children-with-speech-and-language-challenges-ever-recorded-report-says-12954645

Definitely postcode lottery. My dc has SM. And is likely autistic. NHS SALT wouldn’t even see her. We had to go private (as well as for other things).

It's absolutely shite.
If your child has any problem, no matter what their age you are well and truly on your own.
Thank God for the internet, my youngest relies heavily on it as he is self taught, not by choice.

It is absolutely shit. I was so desperate when DD2 was having problems acquiring intelligible speech that I ended up doing so much research I became fascinated by it all... and ended up retraining as a SALT myself! There's no way on this earth I could work in paediatrics with how utterly broken it is - peers I graduated with who went into it have caseloads of 150+ and it's just a production line of banging through 3-4 clinic sessions and back onto waiting lists.

It's bloody bad in my area of work - I'm currently holding down an area where we should have 3 of us as a one-person band at the moment - but nowhere near as dreadful as the situation is with kids - even the private SLTs have big waiting lists as parents try desperately to get some support for their kids.

As for video... seriously - fuck trying to do most SLT stuff that way. We DO manage to use Teams for one particular sub-set of our referrals - but they're ones where we're basically working indirectly with staff teams, often providing resources, and that's the kind of work which can be done on a Teams call at least at the early stages.... not bloody intervention work with kids who'd rather be swiping out of the call to find Cbeebies on iPlayer instead!

There's also a massive issue with recruitment - we've had one post out to recruitment since June last year and just cannot get any viable candidates - it's just an utter mess and SLT is a course that's only offered by a fairly small number of universities as well.

My own daughter now has decently intelligible speech (the clarity fluctuates which is part of the nature of her difficulties) and good understanding of language - but she would have been very very lost without one blooming stubborn mother and grandparents who funded some private SLT input as well.

Out of interest, what is the training qualification path for SALT?

@IanCurtisdancing it's a degree or a masters. The degree used to be 4 years in many places (it was when I trained 25 years ago) but it went down to 3 years a while ago.

As well as being a SLT, I'm also a parent of a child who needed SLT. We had a pretty crap service through the NHS 10 years ago but the situation is 100 times worse now.

The NHS has about 23% empty SALT positions.

One of my DC was looking into doing it at university- the intake of most courses seems to be a max of 35 per year, most subject talks said they could teach more but didn't have the placements available. And there's only about 20 universities that do the course. That's just not a large enough throughput.

I’m so sorry to read all of these stories; I really do think we’re storing up serious problems a decade or so down the line, when all these children we’ve failed are expected to enter the workforce.

I’m lucky enough to be unaffected with my own DD, but I have several close friends who are currently struggling to access help for their DC with speech delay, and it’s been a nightmare for them; all have given up on the NHS and resorted to paying for private speech therapy (running to thousands of pounds), and they are the lucky ones who can afford to do this. As a former primary teacher and current governor I know all too well that the less fortunate ones are turning up in Reception pretty much non-verbal and utterly unable to cope with the demands of school.

I’d also echo what a couple of PPs have said about training as a SALT; I’ve looked into this as an option myself, but while I’m super keen, have pondered it for years and on paper would be an ideal candidate I just don’t think it would be feasible - courses are few and far between and heavily oversubscribed, training would potentially involve placements a long distance away and it’s very intensive and workload heavy, which with a young DD I just don’t think I could manage. And then there aren’t even guaranteed jobs at the end of it, as I know from experience that many areas can’t afford to fund them.

It just seems that there are so many obstacles being put in the way of increasing the SALT workforce, when it’s a massive shortage area and thousands of families are desperate for the help.

It’s definitely a postcode lottery as someone else said.

I'm in Devon and 4 year old DS has just started SALT after a year long wait. I had a TEAMS meeting with the therapist which was great and then he gets 12 sessions with her, which he is having in school.

if he’s still struggling after that then I’ll scrimp & save to continue privately.

Why are there so many children with speech delays now?

Between 3yo and 5yo, my non verbal child was allocated 3 x 30 minutes A YEAR of speech and language therapy. It was shocking. Just before he started school at 5.5yo, we got an EHCP and that allocated more hours but dear god I was jumping about the three half an hours. This was 8 or so years ago and things haven’t got better.

What a twatting shambles, I'm annoyed for you. Your son, and every child deserves better.
My friend's child need an SEN assessment and the specialist doctors thought a fucking video call with a child on the spectrum who couldn't sit down was appropriate.
It's not just that, a video call is not a good way to get a decent representation of a cold with SEN. Terrible.

*child with SEN.

This is not new and not a COVID thing. There used to be so many primary schools with SALT units, basically all closed. We've had this fight since 2010 when DD was 2. It's only got worse.

@GoodnightAdeline Covid and complete lack of therapy?!

And so it ever was.

The Allen report from years ago made it very clear how important early intervention is but the sad reality is that unless you’re living it, no one cares.

In fairness it sounds like the waiting lists are marginally shorter than they were twenty years ago. We waited over two years for an OT assessment, in the meantime he’d been sent to special school but he was not affected by his autism and LD enough to receive any support from the NHS. So too affected to be in mainstream but not affected enough for help. I think we’d already waited three years for the ASD assessment by this stage.

All I can hope for now for him is that he is happy and safe, we’ve learned what helps and doesn’t by a process of elimination and me paying to go on courses to help him. He’s been badly let down by services.

I agree with the first response. It must be a postcode lottery as our support has been great. Dc have had speech therapy on and off for years - weekly sessions and they also went into school multiple times.

They were instrumental in getting a diagnosis, EHCP and finally DLA.

I would write to your local council head of children's services outlining your experience