RCSLT July News: response to 10 year health plan for England; exploring workforce impacts of waiting lists; focus on SEND and more

In our update this month:

• Exploring the workforce implications of waiting lists in children and young people’s speech and language therapy services.
• Response to the 10-year health plan for England.
• Continued focus on SEND in England and proposals in Northern Ireland.
• Report from RCSLT Scotland with an experimental analysis of additional numbers of SLTs needed in education.

This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and produced and edited by freelance producer Jacques Strauss.

Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.

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Transcript

Transcript Date: 

30 July 2025

Speaker Key (delete/anonymise if not required): 

HOST:                         VICTORIA HARRIS

DEREK:                      DEREK MUNN

MUSIC PLAYS: 0:00:00-0:00:05 

HOST:                        0:00:05 Hello and welcome to the Royal College Speech and Language Therapists news podcast for July 2025. I’m Vicky Harris, Head of Learning at the RCSLT and I’m here with my colleague, Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs. He’s going to be walking us through the key things happening around the UK which relate to speech and language therapy.

                                    Waiting times is a theme that we come back to frequently on this podcast, we’ve talked about it a lot. Last week the RCSLT published the results from a survey of over 1,000 speech and language therapists and that showed that waiting times are putting the profession under a lot of pressure. I wonder if you can talk us through the key findings please and what action do you think is needed.

DEREK:                      0:00:44 Interestingly, this was a survey that NHS England commissioned from us, part of an overall look at waiting lists in children and young people’s speech and language therapy. And we asked, as you say, over 1,000 speech and language therapists responded in the period before Christmas last year. In a sense, it confirms what you guys already know if you’re out there working on the ground, but it’s always to have the data to back that up. 

                                    And it was over 60% of speech and language therapists talking about unrealistic time pressure at work, slightly worse in the NHS. Work pressures, caseload complexity and staffing levels, being the key issues. What was influencing people when they thought about what they were going to do, work/life balance. So is it a surprise that speech and language therapists fell under pressure with workload and caseload and work/life balance, not at all, but it’s helpful to have the data which enables us to make that case effectively.

                                    And, of course, 70% of speech and language therapists, particularly in the NHS, were concerned about the children and young people and the waits they had, even for a first appointment. And we know first appointment is only the start of the journey.

                                    Those things need to be reviewed, of course they need to be reviewed. But partly it’s about workforce planning to enable retention in the longer term and wellbeing in the longer term, and the wider work which you, amongst others, are involved in, Vicky, about the route through your career and into the profession.

HOST:                        0:02:17 Thank you Derek. And I think we might be picking up on some of those themes in the next topic. When we met last month we were waiting on the publication of the 10 Year Health Plan for England and it came out earlier this month. I wonder if you can talk listeners through what it could mean for speech and language therapy in England.

DEREK:                      0:02:34 Certainly. Like a number of professional bodies, we are broadly sympathetic to the direction of travel as it’s expressed. The question is going to be, do you make it real this time? It’s not the first time we’ve heard about a shift from hospital to community, but I was very struck that, on the day of the announcement, talking about this huge shift of resources, rebalancing of mindsets into neighbourhood health, in the House of Commons, MP after MP then got up to talk about a local hospital in their constituency. There’s some way to go on that shift of mindset, I think.

                                    Neighbourhood health services. It’s important to use that phrase, neighbourhood health services. There will be neighbourhood health centres, that’s the proposal, but we don’t want to stop talking about one building and start talking about another building. Conceptually, particularly if we think about the speech and language therapy role, enable to health, which can be everything from pre-birth to end of life, let’s be honest. We don’t want to think of just a glorified GP surgery, we need to think more subtly than that about what neighbourhood health will mean.

                                    And there’s an urgent need for us, as a profession, to engage in that, because the first pilots are being set up, the resource is already starting to shift. 

                                    Linked to that, just for the record, we’ve long called for a single, unique identifier for children and, if you can make a single digital record for children and adults and shared IT systems, but all of these things have been spoken about so many times, so the question is what will be different this time.

                                    There’s a distinctive part of our [inaudible 0:04:10] as the Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists, which relates to the proposed focus on the NHS app and relating to self-care. And I talked to one member who is working in the NHS England team on this to try and to make sure, from the inside, that, if we’re going to have self-care based on an app, that app is fully accessible for everyone’s communication needs so that we don’t have a compounding of a lack of digital access exacerbating inequalities. 

                                    And all of this will need investment, as I say, and AHP leadership. 

If I could, Vicky, there’s just a few more things relating to the children side of things, because that section does talk about the extension of Start for Life services to the whole conception to age five range, which should enable additional health visitor and speech and language therapy support. It recognises the promise of the LSEC programme, which people have heard me talk about before, and the role of speech and language therapists in supporting SEND is explicitly referenced.

We’re happy to support the intentions of a direction of travel but it will be in the investment and the reality on the ground this time round.

HOST:                         0:05:22 And I believe we have a webpage where we’ve got our full          response, so I’ll link that in the notes.

What’s happening around the UK which listeners will also find interesting?

DEREK:                      0:05:32 Partly still here in England and partly more widely, that continued focus on SEND. I mentioned it in the context of the 10 Year Plan but, as we move towards a Schools White Paper, probably in October, there’s a lot of continued focus around inevitably the future of Educational Health & Care Plans, where we’re positioning ourselves carefully in response to what might be proposed.

                                    The UK Government’s also produced its strategy to give every child the best start in life. And, again, there’s quite a lot in that that we’re happy to welcome if it’s made a reality. Interestingly, parallel announcements in Northern Ireland, so I’ve mentioned the SEND reform discussions, there have been discussions around SEN, without the D, reform in Northern Ireland, particularly around going up to age 25 and, obviously, we’re engaged in those. And the Northern Ireland Health Minister has also talked about what they called a shift [inaudible 0:06:23] move to community in a Northern Ireland context. 

                                    It’s worth listeners being aware that all of these conversations happen in different ways across the UK and we’re engaged equally in all of them.

                                    Likewise, we were pleased, through our member, Julian Rudd, to give evidence to the House of Commons Modernisation Committee on behalf of the coalition about the communication accessibility of the House of Commons, but we’ve also, this month, had a very helpful debate in the Welsh Senedd around AHP. Ahead of the Welsh elections next year, we’re getting quite a lot of traction now around allied health professions as a sector.

                                    In Scotland, we had coverage on BBC and elsewhere from… We need to be careful here; it was very much an experimental study looking at the kind of numbers that we might need additionally for speech and language therapy in education in Scotland. We’re [inaudible 0:07:17] in relation to the data, but we’re saying this is the kind of thing that we’ll be needing. And it did its job, because it led BBC Scotland and we had a discussion ahead of the Scottish elections about the workforce to be found in serving children’s workforce in Scotland. 

                                    I think that’ll be my rundown for this month.

HOST:                         0:07:36 The next news podcast is out on 18 August and please do, if you haven’t already, take a moment to fill out our feedback survey, which I’ll put in the show notes, because that helps us to continually improve.

MUSIC PLAYS: 0:07:25-0:07:53 

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