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How to Buy In SLT Services

The increasing awareness of children and young people with SEND by parents, teachers and other practitioners means that every nursery/school/educational setting has to become skilled in a variety of specialist needs in order to feel confident and inclusive for all their students.
 
Due to limited resources some education settings are considering how to use their SEND budgets and pupil premium money to buy in additional expertise that they can utilise to support their improvement plan and deliver meaningful outcomes for the children and young people they are preparing for adulthood.
 
Buying in from the NHS provides a level of safety and quality - please see attached two documents that you might find useful, the Camden SLT traded service brochure and a recent commissioning guide published by the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists to support schools to make the right commissioning decisions for them.
 
Obviously our team are not just experts in schools based provision, we also have specialists in deafness, dysphagia, early years, complex needs and youth justice - please do get in touch if you want to discuss your provision.
 
Next steps
 
Speech and language therapy services can be purchased a number of ways and bespoke packages of input are developed to address the needs of each setting. The steps towards this goal are summarised below, and see attached Guidance for Education Settings for more useful advice:
 
  1. Consider level of need within your setting
    • Do you need a full –time member of staff embedded within your setting, part-time or something more one off e.g. an intensive one-off package of care.
  2. Consider what approach will work best for your setting
    • ighly specialist clinical work directed at specific children or young people in 1:1 or small groups e.g. voice, speech, dysphagia, AAC, Language, or specialist advice linked to specific needs e.g. ASD, Down’s syndrome, Deafness, ADHD, Selective Mutism etc. Targeted group interventions devised, delivered and evaluated by the speech and language therapist alongside designated school staff linked to generic area. For example, language development, social communication , attention and listening, memory and learning, comprehension and links to literacy. Universal support linked to the setting e.g. training for all staff, communication friendly classrooms, parent groups, etc. Possibly you want a mix of specialist clinical input, targeted interventions and Listen-EAR input which emphasises a whole setting approach, or you might want our support to audit the level of need and think about different models linked to your budget.
  3. Speak to Kate Bayley
Last updated01 Dec 2020
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