Role of schools and settings
Every Kent school and setting should be working to achieve 15 Balanced System® outcomes for children and young people.
These outcomes are divided into five strands:
- Family support - parents have the confidence, knowledge and skills to support their role as a key communicative partner for their child.
- Environment - environments are enhanced to support children to understand and express themselves effectively.
- Workforce - the workforce is confident and competent to support children with speech, language and communication needs.
- Identification - speech, language and communication needs are identified early and effectively.
- Intervention - children receive support to help them make progress in their speech, language and communication.
And within each strand, there are three levels:
- Universal outcomes and the provisions that help deliver support to all pupils within your school or setting to develop their speech, language and communication skills.
- Targeted outcomes and resources are more directly useful for pupils and their families where there is a concern about speech, language and communication or a need has been identified already. For the majority of children or young people and their families, this level will provide enough support. Targeted provisions may be delivered by school or setting staff who have received specific training as well as by speech and language therapists where appropriate. Targeted provisions may be of benefit to pupils with complex SLCN as part of their wider support.
- Specialist or individualised outcomes and resources are either to support more complicated speech, language and communication needs or to provide more specialist information and help. Some children or young people and their families will need specialist level support as well as targeted and universal levels for them to make the progress they wish to make with speech, language and communication. Specialist level may not be needed all of the time and may be helpful at certain points on a child or young person's journey.
Ensuring my school or setting is meeting the Balanced System® outcomes
Some key questions to consider are:
- Is there easy-to-access information on
- Support for SLC(N) within your setting
- Typical development of speech, language and communication
- How to support children and young people’s speech, language and communication development generally and where there are needs
- What to do if families have concerns
- Signposting to other resources and services?
- Are speech, language and communication needs identified early on? (this could be early on in life or early on in the emergence of a need at any age).
- Is it easy to access support for SLCN? This could include access to the school’s program of targeted intervention, adaptations within the environment, class observation by SENCO or link therapist to identify supporting strategies and ability to make an onward referral when necessary.
- Are children assessed in the context where their need arises, and in discussion with child or young person, their family and school staff?
- For schools, is the link therapist working as part of the school community, and accessible to families through regular presence at suitable times?
- Do you have a strong targeted offer of provisions, across the five strands - family support, environment, workforce development, identification and intervention?
- Are interventions focused on functional (ideally child and family led) outcomes? This includes joint planning and problem solving at every opportunity to ensure the interventions are making a real difference to the child and their family.
- Are you measuring impacts (i.e. what difference did it make?) rather than inputs (e.g. what interventions were delivered).
Access the tools for schools page to evaluate your SLCN provision in relation to the Balanced System® outcomes.