I renewed earlier this year. I'm looking at my claim form, and Question 46 says:
"This is about difficulty in speaking.
They can: Speak clearly in sentences. Yes _ No_
If you want to tell us why you have ticked the boxes, how their needs vary oranything else you think we should know, use the box below."
The accompanying booklet says:
Here are a few examples of other things you may want to tell us.
It’s not a full list and doesn’t cover everything.
They may:
• get easily excited, start speaking very quickly becoming hard to understand
• be depressed and withdraw from conversation
• choose not to speak
• have a stammer, lisp or other speech difficulty
• become frustrated if they can’t be understood
• only speak with family or friends.
You can write anything you want to about speech. I type my answers and make them as long as I want to. For 46 I wrote:
"DD1 tries very hard to speak. She is so determined that she speaks in full sentences and it is easy to overlook how much this costs her. When you listen carefully, she actually says words in clusters of two or three words at a time to form a sentence. So, whereas most people would say ‘Are you going to the park today?’ DD1 actually says ‘Are you. going to. the park today?’ This is because it takes quite a lot of effort for DD1 to say each word and to join them into a sentence.
DD1 has immature speech sounds. She still has evidence of ‘fronting’ (saying ‘tar’ instead of ‘car’ or ‘sip’ instead of ‘ship’), which typically goes at the age of 3½. She still has a ‘stopping j’ (saying ‘dug’ instead of jug), which typically goes at the age of 4½. Many of her speech sounds are immature which causes difficulty in understanding even the most simple of sentences. Unfortunately, in DD1’s mind her speech is perfect – she hears the sound correctly in her mind but produces it incorrectly. This is very, very frustrating for DD1, because when she is asked to repeat a sentence or word, she says it exactly as she said it before, because it still sounds perfect to her. She gets frustrated and dismayed.
DD1 still has word finding difficulties. She knows what she wants to talk about but finds it hard to locate the word for the object in her ‘database’. For example, she will say ‘you know, that thing where you touch it and it goes snap.’ This leaves the listener to try and think of something that would go snap if you touch it (in this case she was talking about a crocodile). It’s extremely frustrating for DD1 (and the listener!).
Most children can be understood by strangers 100% of the time by the age of 4 years old. DD1 is hard to understand even for her grandparents, who see her several times per week. I have to interpret what she is saying for them. Similarly, even my husband (her father) struggles to understand and turns to me to interpret.
DD1 has been having Speech and Language Therapy since she was 3 years old (almost 5 years). Progress is slow and although she is having cued articulation therapy (where she learns certain hand movements to remind her to use a certain part of her mouth to form a sound), progress is unlikely to be radical.
DD1’s speech deteriorates markedly if she is tired, unwell, or unhappy. She will resort to signing at these times. Unfortunately she is a better signer than her parents as her school is a Total Communication Environment (that is, the staff all sign to all people, regardless of whether they require Makaton to communicate) and this is a source of frustration to DD1."
Overkill? Possibly, but it's my form and I always like to assume that the person reading it has no idea about children, let alone ones with SN, and definitely not the complexities of speech and language.
Write what you think affects her speech, which includes her language skills, because we speak to communicate language.
There is also question 47, which is about communication, so you could put some bits in there too.