Early Years Foundation Stage Consultation (part 2)

Not only would statutory assessment at 24-36 months fail to reach all children you have to ask whether it is too early to be effective. How easy is it to identify delay or problem with development age 24 – 36 months? All children develop at different rates. A child may seem to have a speech and language delay at 24 months but have caught up and even surpassed his peers at 36 months with no additional speech and language support. Time and again we have seen this happen.

In our setting which integrates a nursery school, daycare and children’s centre we are fortunate enough to be able to give additional speech and language support for children from 24 to 60 months. We have specialist practitioners who have received speech and language training from speech therapists. All practitioners are tuned into developing children’s language and this, together with groups facilitated by our Sure Start children’s centre for parents and children is making an impact. It works well and we are  now beginning to support children’s  personal, social & emotional development in the same way with specialist well-being practitioners trained in play therapy techniques. Parents are aware and involved in the support offered and they are not made to feel that there is something seriously wrong with their child.

It is unlikely that we will be able to sustain this level of support when funding changes kick in. Small pre-schools, already struggling financially would need a great deal of support to enable them to provide such a service. Will the new eyfs package be realistically helping settings in this early intervention? There are promises of more health visitor involvement and more specialist SEND support from the local authority. This will be vital for every nursery & PVI setting. Without it the whole idea of early intervention is likely to fail miserably and succeed only in labelling children as failures at a very early age.