Early Speech, Language and Communication Development: Which Factors are Associated with Better or Poorer Outcomes?: What is possible within the Scottish context?
Parents, caregivers, and other caring adults need to understand their role in children's language development and to see talking and reading to infants and toddlers as normal and expected of all. Families with stressors and responsibilities may need more support from the larger mesosystem (e.g., from the community) and even ecosystems (e.g., support via public health campaigns) to be able to engage with their children. They will need other caring adults to interact with children when they cannot. Communities should ensure preventative interventions are available to everyone in the population of interest, namely those who may be considered at-risk for less optimal outcomes.
Based on the evidence, we believe early SLC outcomes for many children, particularly those experiencing social and economic adversity, can improve. For this to be true, parents and parents-to-be need information and support at the earliest stage and throughout their child’s early years. All practitioner contacts with parents and parents-to-be can make a difference to early SLC outcomes when support for early responsive interactions is given.
We believe that Scotland’s National Practice Model provides the necessary shared framework and language to think about resilience and risk in relation to early SLC development.
Responsive interaction is strongly associated with better early SLC outcomes. We believe there is no stage of an infant or child’s development that is ‘too early’ to provide parents with this advice and support.
Shift the focus to prevention and early intervention
- We hope this resource will make the case for primary and secondary prevention approaches to be as compelling and as important as the case for early identification. This could include making SLC a priority focus within local children’s planning frameworks.
- The importance of informed parents confidently providing nurturing early language learning experiences within the home is clear. Evidence based early SLC messages are now available to strengthen and augment other universal offers (Chatting together).
Linking current policy to strengthen SLC outcomes
- We recognise that there are a number of current policy and practice approaches that provide opportunities to support early responsive relationships (e.g. Infant Mental Health Framework for Scotland, GIRFEC, Best Start Bright Futures and Realising the Ambition). Clarifying these opportunities in terms of the value for SLC outcomes, will help raise awareness of responsibilities across the workforce to provide preventative and targeted interventions.
- Ensuring a focus on early parental responsiveness within future policy development for the early years, including a focus on understanding, recognising, and addressing the social determinants of SLC, will sustain future improvements.
- Using The National Practice Model and adapted My World Triangle to focus on the wider factors associated with early SLC development will help to improve understanding of SLC as a child wellbeing issue. This will support a focus on targeted approaches that tackle the underlying social determinants of SLC inequalities.
Supporting the Early Years Workforce
- Supporting practitioners to use the National Practice Model to recognise early factors associated with better and poorer SLC outcomes will facilitate targeted support and monitoring at the earliest stage. This gives a prevention opportunity rather than waiting for parental concerns to arise or be identified at a routine CHR.
- Awareness of the dynamic interaction between the factors described within this paper, will support practitioners to be confident and knowledgeable about providing effective early SLC approaches in a way that works for best for individual families and children.
- Raising awareness of the issues described in this paper and building the confidence and the will within the universal workforce to support parents and parents-to-be at the earliest stage is vital to improving outcomes.
- Practitioners most proximal to parents and families have an opportunity to share consistent messages around the importance of early adult-child interactions and why this is important for later SLC outcomes. This may be achieved within current routine practice, such as breastfeeding / maternal wellbeing support, and may involve coaching and modelling for families.
