Disadvantaged areas, nearly half of the children have low speech skills?!!

[Guest guest]

Young Children Need To Be Assessed For Speech Problem

by Abby Kapoor

Published on July 11, 2008

On Tuesday, a Government backed report found that nearly fifty

percent of pre-school children in some deprived parts of Britain have

speech difficulties and the help available to these young children

is " highly unsatisfactory. "

In response to the report by the Tory MP Bercow, the government

announced that small children must be early assessed for speech

difficulties and issued a £12 million package to help implement the

recommendations of Mr Bercow's report and to tackle the communication

problems.

Another £40million will be spent on training pre-school workers and

tackling children's communication problems early on so that it could

not create long-term problems. The £40 million programme was called

as " Every Child a Talker. "

At a school in Westminster, Bercow flanked by Health Secretary

Alan and School Secretary Ed Balls said, " We want to monitor

children at early ages and stages so that if there is a problem we

can pick up on it and help them with their speech and communication

needs. "

He said his young son Oliver has dyspraxia (verbal), hence this issue

is very close to his heart and he was pleased that political point

scoring had been put aside in trying to find some solutions.

Bercow, the author of a report on speech, language and

communication (SLC) needs said that nearly 7% of pre-school children

across the United Kingdom require help in speaking and listening.

Approximately, 40,000 children in 2007 had speech or language

difficulties.

While in other disadvantaged areas, nearly half of the children and

youngsters had speech/ and or language skills significantly lower as

compared to those of other children of the same age group. The

problems ranged from delayed speech development and stammering to

serious impairments and communication difficulties as part of a wider

problem, such as autism.

Mr Bercow said, " Speech, language and communications problems in

children are three times as prevalent as dyslexia, ten times as

prevalent as autism. And yet they are often unrecognised, just as

dyslexia was 20 years ago, "

Such children without help would do poorly in school. It may also

cause emotional and behavioural problems and may " descend into

criminality " , the report says.

The SLC report also found that there was a surge in home-related

speech problems, exhibited by small kids who are not encouraged by

their mother/father to speak from an early age and this was adding

fuel to the fire. Mr Berwo also added that he was not clear about the

real cause for the epidemic but it could be due to exposure to TV and

computer games at an early age.

He said, " As a matter of common sense, I think you can conclude that

where a child is exposed or subjected to an endless diet of TV and

video games without sufficient social interaction from parents or

carers, then that can be damaging. "

The review has many recommendations. It call on school to look out

for language problems from the starting and for parents, it suggests

that they should talk more with their children. It will request more

information for parents on what to do if their toddlers do not start

talking.

In year 2003, a report was published in Journal Watch Psychiatry, in

which the leading author, Bauchner, MD said that the presence

of speech and language problems in small children predicts long-term

learning difficulties, but the best way to detect such problems in

primary care.

Young children with hearing problems can have difficulty developing

speech and language. Some babies are born with hearing problems while

other children are born with normal hearing and begin to have hearing

problems as they grow older.

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