Project aims
- To gain a better understanding of what the NI childcare sector, pre-school educators (include youth and community organisations) and parents want and need in relation to speech, language and communication training and further support.
- To promote the well-established and evidence-based, universal training programmes from Help Kids Talk, which will have a wider, regional reach demonstrated by increased uptake from the childcare, pre-school sector and parents.
- To co-produce and test relevant and engaging bitesize videos and printable resources based on the information from SLTs, parents and childcare/ pre-school partners.
Part one
Part one of the project involved a region wide survey. The survey was sent out in December 2024 and received 1089 responses from 4 groups of people. Please click on the group to view the individual results from each survey.
- Parents/ carers
- Practitioners – those who work or volunteer with babies, children and young people including teachers, classroom assistants, youth and community workers, early years practitioners and child minders.
- Health, medical and social care professionals including doctors, social workers, health visitors and allied health professionals (excluding SLTs).
- Speech and Language Therapists.
Help Kids Talk have a well-established training offer of Basic Awareness and Level 1 training for parents and those working with children and young people on understanding and supporting speech, language and communication development. This training is online and runs monthly. As part of Language Launchpad, the link to book the training was included with the survey and as a direct result, there was a significant increase in the number of those who attended online or in person training across Northern Ireland.
Part two
Once the survey results were analysed (by FN Research company) the Language Launchpad steering group discussed and prioritised the creation of resources. It was agreed that a focus group with parents and one with Health Visitors would be useful in providing more narrative around the information gathered. More information on findings from these is provided in the report.
Resources produced include both short, bitesize videos and downloadable information sheets for printing as needed. Help Kids Talk led on the development of the resources with the exception of the videos by expert SLTs Stephen Parsons and Val Brooks who kindly donated their time.
We held two further focus groups with a number of parents and professionals to review and comment on the resources that had been created by early March. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive with inspired ideas on how they could be utilised in their own settings.
