Speech and language key is vital to confident young futures

That’s how many children between the ages of five and 15 are struggling with talking and understanding words right now. It’s a staggering number and also the highest that we at Speech and Language UK have ever recorded. It is for this reason alone that our new strategy is so ambitious.

Far too many children are going through life unable to do the things many of us take for granted. This affects every aspect of their and their families’ lives. Sadly, these children are more likely to fail in key subjects at school, more likely to have mental health problems and even more likely to be out of work as an adult. So many people care about all these social problems, but do they also recognise the massive link with speech and language challenges? If not, we need to change that.

• Record number of children struggling with speech and language difficulties

To help them make that link and understand what to do, we have launched our new five-year strategy – Confident young futures.

Over the next five years we want our tools and training to reach even more nurseries, primary and secondary schools to make speech and language central to their everyday practice across the UK. To do this, we will create an online speech and language learning platform and update our existing training and increase its reach to school and nursery staff. We will also create new and innovative tools and invest in training and in our existing programmes and resources – with updates to our Early Talk Boost programme, the What Works database and Early Talk training.

Whilst these plans are ambitious, its simply not enough to engage with practitioners and professionals alone. We want to actively engage with parents and families. Our recent Listening to unheard children report found that almost 80 per cent of teachers believe parents do not recognise the importance of speech, language and communication skills at all.

To change this, over the next five years, we will ask families and young people to tell us what information they need from us, and we will listen to what they say. We will understand where there are gaps so that we spend our time filling them rather than duplicating existing content without a purpose and we will digitise more of our advice for families and young people.

Over the next five years, we will continue to demand that the government funds support for every child with speech and language challenges who needs it, including providing and developing tools to check how they are doing and specialist support for children with lifelong challenges. We will push for the National Institute for Clinical Excellence to finally create some guidance on language disorder after more than two decades of waiting. And we’ll push for better training for all of the children’s workforce – the Early Years Professional Development Programme that government funds (and we run) only reaches a tiny fraction of the staff who need it. With one in five children and young people experiencing speech and language challenges, that must change.

If people care about literacy, they need to start caring about speech and language. If people care about children and young people's mental health, they need to start caring about children who have speech and language challenges. If people care about numeracy, youth offending or youth unemployment, they might not know it yet, but they care about speech and language development.

Our new strategy is the result of extensive engagement and consultation with over 700 family members, supporters and educators who told us that our combination of tools and training for schools and nurseries, advice to families and young people and campaigning is crucial.

Together, we can give more children confident futures. 1.9 million children cannot afford to wait for change. We are calling on everyone who can help them to join us and change young lives.

Jane Harris is chief executive of Speech and Language

For more information about Speech and Language UK’s ambitious new strategy, visit: https://speechandlanguage.org.uk/confident-young-futures/