SALT question, am I wasting my time chasing help for my AS ds?

[Peaceflower]

ds is 9, with no obvious language difficulty, apart from speaking in an pseudo american acccent, and sentences tailing off into mumbles . He only spoke a few words at two but was speaking in sentences by 4.

He had a SALT assessment and hearing test when he was 4, hearing was deemed ok, and speech okay apart from a lateral something which I forget.
However he finds communication very very difficult. He does not know how to respond to eg a friend running up to show him something - he will respond by saying "yeah, so what" and is oblivious when the friend runs away feeling hurt. He does not know how to ask for anything, eg if I forget to put cutlery out for him, he will sit in front of his meal quietly and not say anything until I ask why he is not eating! At school recently, he missed the lunch bell and did not eat or drink anything all day. He did not think to say this to his teacher or anyone else, but was in distress when I picked him up at the end of the day . He does not seem to be able to say/ask when he needs something.

There also seems to be a delay processing what's said to him, and he compensates with strategies like "oh, that's easy", "oh, what was that again", etc.

I spoke to a friend who is a SALT who says she helps children like him. But my local NHS trust say they can't help him, as they don't work with children with social communication difficulties. Through an FOI I received information that in fact they were treating a number of children with social communication difficulties only, but they have said this was in fact a clerical error.

As part of his CAF, I requested a SALT assessment but the SALT only spent 20 mins with him and discharged him. I repeated the request through my GP but the SALT would not carry out another assessment. Apparently ds would need someone with him full-time to be helped, and the school SALT only visits once a term! They say it's the school's responsibility.

Am I wasting my time chasing SALT help, should I be looking at something else? The school does not appear to be capable of helping, only offering a 10 mins of play with a "friend" a week to help with social skills.

A lot depends on the s/lt you get.
There is huge variation (as in any profession).
The challenge is to take something as vast and complex as 'communication' which has so many different facets (eg speech sounds, turn taking skills, grammar, vocabulary and so on) and to be able to identify and work on the components in a way that is measurable and observable.

So how do you measure your child's ability to respond to questions appropriately or increase their attempts at initiating conversation?
Additionally, most s/lts are not trained in data collection or measurement techniques.

So what happens is that people get given a lot of well meaning but rather vague advice ('Work on turn taking') which is basically a summary of what they probably knew in the first place.

An assessment is useful only in terms of the content being read and absorbed by the people who support your child, and if you have a 1:1 assistant, the chances are that she wil never be given it to read in the first place. Even if she is, is she capable of digesting the contents and acting on them?

o, what one has is essentially a perfect storm of things that can and do go wrong.

Peace, as you say, what does work is breaking a task down into componnet parts nad working on them, reinforcing a child for progress every step of the way. That is essentially what ABA does, However, there are probably fewer than 5 s/lts in the UK who combine these techniques with s/lt.

Simple checklists like this are invaluable in helping you define what to work on.

Moondog Thank you for taking the time to explain things, I will look up what you have suggested.

You're most welcome.
I wish I could be more positive but at least hopefully you will now have a clearer idea of how things are and be able to plan accordingly.