Specialist and Outreach Teams: Speech and Language Therapy Service

The Children’s Speech and Language Therapy Service supports children and young people in Doncaster and Bassetlaw aged 2-16 years who have difficulties with communication, or with eating, drinking and swallowing. We also support young people aged 16 – 19 years old who have an Education Health and Care Plan (EHCP) who are attending schools in Doncaster and Bassetlaw.

About the Service

The Children’s Speech and Language Therapy Service provide assessment, diagnosis and treatment for children and young people with speech, language, communication, and feeding and swallowing difficulties.

The service sees children and young people in clinics, hospitals, schools, nurseries and other early years settings, and at home.

The mainstream schools SaLT service sees children and young people in Y1 and up who have language disorder in their schools, and where they have allocated 1-1 support that can work on agreed therapy goals in school and in between visits from SaLT. Children whose main needs are pronunciation are seen in clinic.

In order for this to be effective, their allocated staff member needs to be present at all SaLT visits to school so that they can share important information with us, and so that we can discuss children and therapy with them and support them to work on the agreed targets.

With this in mind, we are now going to complete two school visits for most children. One will be to complete assessment/review of the child, and one will be to demonstrate the intervention and strategies to a member of staff. Without time to model therapy and support staff, we know that our support is much less likely to be effective.

Please make sure that the member of staff who will be working on the SaLT therapy goals in school is able to attend both these sessions. If a suitable member of staff is not able to attend these sessions then we will not be able to set therapy goals for that child and they will not be able to remain on our mainstream schools caseload going forward.

Children’s Speech and Language Therapy Service

How can a child be referred?

The child must meet the threshold for accessing specialist Speech and Language Therapy care on our communication checklist

Referrals can be made by anyone, including parents/carers, schools, GPs, and Health Visitors. Referrals from professionals must be made with parent/carer knowledge and consent.

Referrals can be made by downloading and completing the referral form and communication checklist.

Referrals for eating, drinking, and swallowing difficulties must be made using our feeding referral form.

Referral Forms

What difficulties does the service support with?

The majority of difficulties fall into the following areas:

understanding what is said to them
expressing themselves
talking clearly (saying speech sounds)
stammering
eating and drinking

How to access the service?

To access the service children and young people must:

have a Doncaster or Bassetlaw GP
be aged 2-18 years old
have speech and language needs that meet the criteria for specialist SLT care for their age (see S&LT communication checklist)

An immediate referral should be made if a child:

is stammering or if a parent reports hearing stammering, or
has difficulty with the mechanics of eating and drinking (not sensory / or behavioural feeding difficulties), or
has nasal regurgitation of food
makes most of their speech sounds at the back of their throat
has significantly nasal sounding speech