Our Partners
Our Regional Skills Strategy
Parts of the children’s workforce in South Yorkshire don’t feel confident identifying and addressing SLCN, leading to pressures on Speech & Language Therapy services.
However, the children’s workforce has the unique opportunity to support SLC development and to identify and, where appropriate, address SLCN. To do so requires a confident and highly skilled workforce, and with a high turnover of staff, and financial pressures on the sector, the level of high-quality training for new entrants is becoming increasingly challenging.
Through the Early Outcomes Project, we developed a Regional Skills Strategy to identify our regional skills gaps and develop approaches to address them.
What have we done so far?
Since starting the project in April 2019, we have developed a regional skills strategy, developed local training opportunities for our children’s workforce, and reviewed local services to ensure that assessments and interventions with young children are robust at identifying and tackling speech, language and communication needs.
Throughout the project, we have been measuring our progress against the Early Intervention Foundation’s Speech, Language and Communication Maturity Matrix, and we have established a governance arrangement across the region to continue working together to improve our maturity beyond the funding period of the project.