Early Years Workforce Development: Speech and Language Support

Tender description

Herefordshire is seeking to make a significant, fixed term, investment in the early years workforce that will deliver improved early identification and support for young children with speech, language and communication needs, and their families. A key objective is that the work, learning and benefit of the service is sustained beyond the lifetime of the contract. The primary outcomes that the service aims to achieve are to: 1. enable the Early Years workforce to effectively support parents to understand how to develop their child’s communication skills 2. develop and strengthen the skills and capabilities across Herefordshire’s Early Years offer and workforce so that the speech, language and communication needs of children aged under five years are better identified and supported 3. ensuring that those skills capabilities are embedded and sustained across the Early Years offer and workforce beyond the lifetime of the contract 4. improve attainment of early learning goals for communication and language to 95% for girls and 85% for boys at the end of reception year by April 2021 5. increase for Herefordshire’s funded two year olds from 52.8% at the expected level for speaking at age 3years (62.0% for listening and attention, and 62.9% understanding) 2017, to a minimum of 54% and, 63% and 64% respectively by the end of the contract term. 6. target settings achieving Communication Friendly Accreditation status 7. new referrals of children aged under five to Herefordshire’s speech and language therapy service are consistently appropriate To achieve these aims, the service will: 1. deliver communication friendly setting accreditation and lead communication practitioners within target settings throughout Herefordshire 2. deliver practitioner training for Elklan ‘let’s talk’ or equivalent programmes 3. support settings to deliver their own small group and individual work, using learning from evidence based programmes 4. establish self-sustaining networks of lead communication practitioners 5. establish and embed an online toolkit for use by families and professionals Keywords: Early Years, Language, Speech, Training