Welcome to Communicate SLT’s services for the Borough of Halton

Our team provide the following services:

• Universal support and training for The Children’s Workforce in Early Years settings and schools.
• Targeted intervention support to enable Early Years settings and schools to deliver adapt practice to manage the communication development needs within their setting.
• Specialist level services following a request for service. This will include assessment, target setting and intervention.
• As well as services integrated within the:
  • Family Hub Team offering support for select Early Years settings and parents’ groups and workshops.
  • Youth Justice Service providing assessment, advice, and interventions.

Making a referral

We have an open request for service system, which means that anyone can make a request, with consent from the person with parental responsibility.

Most requests are made by parents/carers, Health Visitors or the nursery, school, or college that the children or young person attends.

Requests for SLT services are made using an online form above.

All children under 11 years old should have a WellComm screening score included on the request for services.

The WellComm screening tool identifies children as Green (language developing appropriately), Amber (mild to moderate difficulties), and Red (may have significant difficulties). Parents can request for a WellComm screening to be completed by a Health Visitor, nursery, or school.

What happens after a referral is received?

Following a request, we will:

1. Acknowledge the request by sending you and the referrer an email.
2. Get in touch with parents/carers as soon as possible by email and/or phone to:

• • Find out more information about your child or young person.
  • Explain the next steps.
  • Suggest ways you can help the child or young person in the meantime.

3. If we can’t reach the parents/carers, we will contact the referrer or the child’s nursery, school or college and ask them to help us reach the family.
4. If we cannot reach parents/carers, but the child attends a nursery, school, or college in Halton, we may go ahead and accept the request if parental consent has been given at the request stage.
5. If the child or young person does not go to nursery, school or college and we cannot reach the parents/carers to arrange an assessment then we cannot accept the request and will notify the referrer.

Once we have all the information needed, we will ‘triage’ the request. This means we will decide what services are best to meet the need.

We will then let parents/carers and the referrer know the triage decision by email.

We will deliver appointments for children, young people and families within Family Hubs, Children’s Centres or within the child’s nursery, school, or college. Where possible, we will offer a choice of location, days, and times.

Communicate SLT use a tool called the North Staffordshire Risk matrix to quantify clinical need. This matrix is applied to every child, at each assessment-point, regardless of their age, learning ability, type or level of speech, language or communication need or education placement. It allows us to quantify when our service is needed and when a child’s needs are being adequately managed and advanced by their skilled communication partners where they live and learn

Following most requests, the next step will be an assessment of the child or young person’s speech, language, and communication skills.

Where appropriate, children and young people will be assessed within the nursery, school, or college they attend. This allows our team to observe their communication skills in practice and witness any impact on their learning and socialisation. In this case, the perspective of parents/carers and a case-history may be gathered before the appointment via a phone call or an online form.

When the child or young person is not yet in nursery, is home educated, or for those within Youth Justice Service, assessment may take place at a clinic or community venue or in conjunction with a partner service or within the family home.

We aim to facilitate effective communication for the children and young people in Halton. Often this involves working with children and young people’s “conversation partners” rather than the children themselves. By doing so, we can ensure that the everyday conversations, activities, and routines that children and young people experience are successful, positive and a valuable learning experience.

Our work, therefore, will often involve providing information, resources, training and support for parents, carers, and the workforce that support children and young people’s learning.

A small number of children and young people may need interventions to be delivered by a member of our team. In these cases, we will define the targets, the time-period and we will always aim to coach the people in the child/young person’s life so that they can support the child/young person further.

When a child/young person has an Education and Health Care Plan in place, they may have longer term input from our team.

Our team will develop close links with Early Years settings, childminders, primary and secondary schools, and the Virtual School in Halton. We will allocate team members to clusters of educational settings to act as a central point of contact, providing universal, targeted and specialist advice and support.

We will assign members of our team to work within Halton’s Special Schools and SLC Resource Bases, providing and overseeing input for children and young people with specialist levels needs.

Support within all educational settings will focus on:

• Leadership – promoting whole school policy, planning and processes which support Speech, Language and Communication (SLC).
• Workforce – supporting people within school to be confident and competent in working with children and young people with Speech Language and Communication Needs (SLCN).
• Environment – ensuring that interactions, activities, and routines maximise opportunities for learning.
• Early Identification of SLCN and the use of referral pathways.
• Intervention – using WellComm, Talk Halton and other resources and specialist interventions.
• Linking with parents/carers to jointly offer workshops, information, and resources focussing on the home communication environment.

We will also offer regular consultation cluster sessions to educational settings to:

• Provide updates to the group.
• Discuss individual children and young people.
• Share and model strategies and interventions identified through referrals to the service.

These cluster consultations will have a coaching ethos, valuing the collective wisdom within this sector, promoting high-quality evidenced-based interventions, and providing advice, strategies and guidance for individuals and groups of children identified by the educational settings.

We will also attend Educational Psychology Service consultations when the children and young people being discussed have significant Speech Language and Communication Needs (SLCN).

We will provide a rolling programme of training so that the workforce in Halton has the necessary confidence and skills to support Speech, Language, and Communication.

Over the next few months:

We will consult with the Halton community to define the training offer. However, we know that this will support the continued implementation of the Wellcomm screening and intervention tools and the Talk Halton Communication Hub materials (including the audits, toolkits, and language resources).

A member of our team will be seconded to work within the Family Hub team in Halton.

They will then work with colleagues to:

• Support selected Early Years settings (nurseries).
• Plan and deliver parent/carer workshops and training.
• Plan and deliver training for The Children’s Workforce.

Communicate SLT CIC will support young people with Speech, Language and Communication Needs (SLCN) who access Youth Justice Services (YJS) in Halton.

When providing this service, we will work closely with the YJS team and other professionals to:

• Enable the identification of SLCNs.
• Create environments which maximise the young person’s current skills.
• Enable the young person to use their communication skills in the best way possible to maximise success in education, personal life and the community.
• Provide advice and training so that the YJS team can modify interventions to account for SLCN.
• Support others to modify their communication and the environment to help the young person.
• Enable the use of visual support systems (signs, symbols) so that the young person has greater understanding of the information presented.
• Maximise the chances of positive engagement and reduce the risk of reoffending/mental health issues.

Dysphagia is the medical term for swallowing difficulties.

Dysphagia referrals

Communicate SLT can only accept referrals for dysphagia services from a medical professional such as a GP, Consultants or Specialist Nurse. It would be usual to receive this in the form of a letter, e.g. from a GP. We also need a Request for Service for the child or young person and Communicate SLT will support the completion of this Request for Service where needed.

Referral criteria

Referrals for dysphagia are accepted where the child or young person:

• Is non-oral and requires oral stimulation advice.
• Is fed non-orally e.g. gastrostomy tube, nasogastric fed and is ready to start eating foods.
• Has swallowing difficulties e.g. choking, recurrent chest infections, weight loss, persistent coughing.
• Has a medical condition that affects eating and drinking and there has been a change in these skills.
• Has acquired a medical condition that has caused a change in eating and drinking skills.

If professionals are uncertain about whether a Request for Service meets this criteria, they can contact our team to ask for advice.

Requests for service are not accepted for:

• A child under 12 months or developmentally less than 12 months old and who has no medical conditions, eats solids but may gag on solid foods.
• A child who only eats a small variety of food, is selective with foods and/or may refuse to eat certain food e.g. vegetables.
• A child who drinks more milk than recommended for their age, resulting in them eating less solid foods.
• A child who has a tongue tie but can eat a range of textures.
• Children with an eating disorder associated with a psychological diagnosis e.g. anorexia.

When an inappropriate Request for Service is received, the referral agent is notified and advice is given about other local services / resources.

First contact

We will attempt to make contact to arrange for triage, by a trained Speech and Language Therapist, within 5 working days of a valid dysphagia referral with an associated Request for Service being received.

Assessment

Where possible, assessments will take place in the child / young person’s home or educational setting so that the Speech and Language Therapist can observe their typical feeding environment.

Care plan

Following assessment, each child or young person will be provided with an individualised care plan.

This may include:

• Dietary modifications.
• Recommendations for safe feeding practices.

The care plan may be developed in collaboration with the multidisciplinary team, including dietitians, occupational therapists, and paediatricians also  involved in the child / young person’s care.

Communicate SLT deliver the SLT assessments for children and young people on the Neurodevelopmental Pathway in Halton, working in partnership with the Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) at Woodview Child Development Centre.

For parents/carers who are awaiting a speech, language and communication assessment for their child/young person as part of the ASD Pathway, you may find the following information useful.

As at 13 November 2024, please be advised we are booking appointments for referrals made (and therefore accepted) in January 2023. We will continue to update this webpage as we make progress here. There are a handful of children and young people who were referred and accepted onto the pathway in November and December 2022 whose parents/carers we remain unable to make contact with. Please remember that the contact details we have been supplied by the MDT are (in some cases) those which were on the original ASD referral form which may now be out of date. If you feel your child might be one of these, please can you get in touch as below so we can book an assessment asap.

A more detailed update about our input for this pathway can be found here.

Discharge is a medical term which applies when specialist level services are no longer needed. This is always the end goal of any specialist level service, as it often indicates that the input has been successful in achieving the agreed outcomes.

Discharge plans are always discussed with the child / young person and their parents / or carers.

A child or young person will be discharged from our services in Halton when:

• The child or young person’s speech, language, communication is within normal limits.
• The aims of intervention have been achieved.
• The North Staffordshire Risk Matrix score indicates that the child or young person’s needs can be managed by their daily communication partners.

Discharge may also be appropriate when:

• Progress is limited by a young person’s levels of motivation, engagement with our service or their implementation of guidance.
• A person with parental responsibility withdraws consent for us to provide the service.
• A family and / or educational setting does not engage with the service or take up appointments offered.
• The child / young person moves out of the commissioned area.

Discharge will usually take place following an assessment or episode of care. Where this is the case, a care plan with targets and resources may be supplied. Advice will also be provided about when to re-refer.

When to re-refer

Most children and young people should be re-referred when there is:

• A significant change in the child/young person’s speech/language/communication or feeding.
• A change in the environment that the child or young person is in or the management of their speech, language or communication needs.
• A change in readiness/commitment to therapy (child, family and/or school/setting)

Parents and carers are often the best people to help their children learn. Afterall, you know them well and want to give them the best start in life. The more you know, the more you can help. Here are some useful links to information online:

• What to expect and when
• BBC Tiny Happy People
• NHS Toolkits for parents
• Stammering information and advice 
• Selective mutism information and advice
• Understanding Autism

Finding local support:

• Family Hubs in Halton
• Halton Local offer
• Halton SEND Carers Forum
• Advanced solutions