Empty Places in Specialist Speech Nursery in Ealing - especially Verbal Dyspraxia

[HayleyK]

Was talking to an girl I know who is a SALT in an ICAN nursery centre in Ealing, who says that they have quite a few spaces for children with severe speech disorders (see link below - I think this must be the right place)

My child has verbal dyspraxia and I struggled hugely to find the right program for him and ended up doing everything privately and being put on a year and half waiting list for local speech therapy services. Here is a FREE nursery with a really lovely speech therapist trained in Nuffield program where they don't have enough kids for the centre.

It seemed crazy to me and a complete shame - so I thought I'd mention it here in case anyone thought it might be great for their child who has a significant speech need. I don't know all the details, but can get back in touch with the SALT if anyone wants me to, or you can probably contact the nursery directly. Maybe there is some reason that they don't have many kids there, but it sounded like they are waiting for kids with significant speech needs to help.

I think the centre may also intergrate with mainstream kids without speech needs as well, which also sounded interesting.

Hope this may help someone.

www.ican.org.uk/early%20talk/early%20talk%20in%20practice/early%20years%20centres.aspx

bump

turns out it is not the ICAN one, but still sounded like it may be a good option - let me know if interested and I'll try to find out more.

There is also a specialist speech and language unit in a very good primary school up here in Bradford.

When I contacted them they said "we manage to fill the places most years" (!!!!!!)

The problem, it seems, is that you need a Statement to get into the nursery - and who has a Statement sorted out by 3.0? Not many people.

It might be that there's some gatekeeping. I looked into an ICAN place for ds2 (who had suspected verbal dyspraxia) and the only way to access it was via a specialist SALT and paed referral. Which would have taken a good 15 months or so

IME there's a lot of gatekeeping. To get into the one in my city (the existence of which noone professional ever bothered to mention to me ), you would need to not only get to top of 8 month SALT waiting list, but then to get to top of ed psych list, and be approved by senior SALT. which would have taken at least a year. Also a degree of cherry-picking the children for SALT nursery and language units - was told in my area that they wouldn't take children with ASD and/or learning difficulties. (NB think there are some kids with ASD at the school language units).

Given I only found out about the existence of the ICAN nursery less than a year before DS was due to start reception

"they wouldn't take children with ASD "

daft given that some autisms are basically language problems writ large.

our speech and language units won't take kids with ASD either.

makes no sense. DS1(7) who quite clearly does not have autism, and it would be absurd to suggest he did, equally clearly learnt language in the same way as many of the autistic kids on this board do.

differentiating autism from language problems is the wrong distinction surely. The energy should be going into differentiating all the many different autisms from each other.

If they want to exclude kids with concentration problems or with behavioural problems or strong sensory (as opposed to audio processing) issues from a language unit, they should just say that - not reject kids on the basis of an ASD dx.

It is the same here. There is a school with a Lanugauge Resource Base that would be a really good fit for my son. They won't consider him as he has been diagnosed with autism, even though his main deficit area is language and he doesn't have significant behavioural problems.

Can't blame our LEA, as it is in a neighbouring borough, but the alternative for Max is a mainstream school with 25 hours of one-to-one and input from a speech-therapist once per term - twice if lucky.

I know this is a better offer than many, but we can't see how without input from specailists and regularly reviews of progress he can close the gap between him and his peers.