Interventions for children with speech, language and communication needs: An exploration of current practice

Abstract

This article reports a series of interviews with education and health practitioners. The aims were to identify interventions used in practice with children with speech, language and communication needs, to explore explanations for the choice of intervention and to identify the ways that outcomes were measured. Participants (n = 61) included educational psychologists, speech and language therapists and education advisory staff. They talked about interventions in terms of published programmes, principles and activities, strategies, resources and training programmes. There was evidence of local adaptation of interventions and wide development of local programmes. The choice of intervention was governed by a desire to meet identified service gaps and with reference to the evidential and/or theoretical basis of the intervention and the practicalities of the intervention. Outcomes were typically measured at the level of the individual rather than a service level. The study provided insight into the range of interventions in current practice, how service managers justify intervention choices and measure outcomes. The data from this study informed a national survey to examine patterns of usage of interventions.

Evidence-based intervention for preschool children with primary speech and language impairments: Child Talk – an exploratory mixed-methods study

“…37,89,96,115 In addition, a selection of published programmes was reviewed to identify activities and strategies that were explicitly mentioned: the Nuffield Centre Dyspraxia Programme (NDP), 116 the Derbyshire Language Scheme (DLS), 117 the Makaton programme, 118 core vocabulary, 119 the Hanen programme, 120 cued articulation 121 and the Metaphon programme. 122 The data were used for later comparison with the interventions presented in the survey to check for comprehensiveness.…”

“…The focus of the content analysis was on description and classification of the interventions. Interventions were classified following the definitions used in Roulstone et al 89 as follows:…”

“…The survey started with a set of nine videos, made by the parent panel and research team, which demonstrated the strategies typically recommended to parents by SLTs and the activities used to model these. The strategies and activities were selected from data provided by SLTs on their current practice from the BCRP's national survey 89 and through content analysis of the Child Talk SLT focus groups (see Chapter 2, Study 2.2: identifying the interventions used by speech and language therapists). The videos included a brief description of the strategies and the rationale behind them followed by a demonstration of the activities and toys that the SLT survey had shown were typically used by SLTs (see Chapter 2, Study 2.2: identifying the interventions used by speech and language therapists).…”

“…However, these models have not translated into a standard way of reporting interventions in the research literature. An exploration of current practice included in the BCRP 89 found that participants referred to more than 150 different interventions, including published interventions, programmes, theories of intervention and training packages. Summarising the literature, Roulstone et al 89 noted that interventions had been variously described as actions, techniques, activities and procedures that were used to facilitate progress, prevent other problems, modify barriers and facilitate changes to the communication environment.…”

“…On the other hand, intervention programmes include a whole range of activities and strategies and thus need some deconstruction to identify the individual components. The definitions used by Roulstone et al 89 were used in this research programme to differentiate activities and strategies:…”