Chamber and committees

Superintendent Corrigan, do you have anything to add?

Can you expand on that a bit and give us an example? I know that that will be difficult, given that this is a new thing.

Thank you.

I want to come back on that briefly. You have said that the improvement plans are drawn up a year in advance. Obviously those plans are prepared without knowing which children will be in the classroom and what their needs are. Is that right?

Okay.

It does, thank you.

You were talking about how resource straddles health and education. I am not going to ask which local authority you are talking about—even though the convener is asking me to—but what do you think needs to change? After all, children’s services as a whole straddle health and education, so the obligations to support children should already be there, if you know what I mean. I struggle to understand how that can happen.

Good morning, and thank you for being with us. My questions are for our witness from the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, but I am happy to hear from anyone else.

We have heard about the importance of communication and its impact on attainment and behaviour, and in protecting against mental health issues. In your submission, you say that there has been a marked increase in presentations since the start of the pandemic and that, three years on, demand is still high. I was quite struck by the numbers in your submission, in which you say that, in May 2023, more than 6,000 children were waiting for speech and language therapy and that the average longest wait for initial contact and the average longest wait for individualised therapy were more than a year.

I have a number of questions. Has there been any easing of the pressure? Does what you say about the average longest wait for initial contact and the average longest wait for individualised therapy mean that a child is likely to have to wait for more than a year or that they are likely to have to wait for more than two years, if that makes sense? Do they have the contact and then have to wait another year for the individualised treatment?

I would also be interested to hear about the impact of those waits on development. In answering my colleague Michelle Thomson’s questions, you spoke about the importance of intervening and you said that it was possible to catch up, but it would be helpful for the committee to understand what the impact might be for a three or four-year-old, say, of having to wait for a year before receiving an intervention.

Committee members spent some time with children and young people and heard what was important to them. One thing that stuck out for me was how important, protective and empowering it is for them to have positive relationships. Communication is key to that.

You spoke about a whole-system approach and gave a helpful example of where that had been built in and how all the staff or people around a child could pick up that approach. What needs to change for us to have a whole-system approach? Is it the case that getting it right for children with communication challenges or difficulties is better for everybody? Is it good for all children, such that it is not just about a specialist service?

I will be brief, convener. I think that the interactions have been helpful and interesting.

Quite often, we think that the answer is to cram everything into initial teacher training, but clearly it is not. I recognise the model that Glenn Carter talked about, in which allied health professionals and members of children’s services teams are embedded in schools, but, in my experience, that sort of thing happens in a specific school. It is not happening across the board, even within a local authority area.

This might be a question for Irene Stove. Given the challenges in getting cover for teachers to undertake training and coaching on specific aspects, are there any examples of where work is done in the classroom—and perhaps even with the children and the teacher—so that it benefits everyone? I hope that that makes sense.

I ask for clarity—my question might be about my memory of the evidence. I am not entirely clear that we took substantial evidence that there is a prevailing policy to place children in proximity to their local authority area. Will you expand on that? I do not quite recall that being the case.