RCSLT news Sept 2025: Special educational needs update for England and N. Ireland; partnership report on children's services in Scotland; CAUK; RCSLT conference

In our update this month:

• Update on special educational needs in England and Northern Ireland.
• Partnership report on children's services in Scotland.
• CAUK training for parliamentarians as part of National Inclusion Week.
• RCSLT conference.

Useful links:

• Sign up to our free Communication Access training: Home - Communication Access UK
• Book your place at the RCSLT Conference 2025: https://www.rcslt.org/news/book-your-place-at-rcslt-conference-2025/ 

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.
 
Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey: uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3R

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

Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey: uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3R

Transcript

Transcript Date: 

8 October 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 Good morning. Hello and welcome to the Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists news podcast for September. It’s Friday, 26th today. I’m Vicky Harris, Head of Learning at the Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists and, as always, I’m delighted to be joined by my colleague, Derek Munn, Director of Policy & Public Affairs. Good morning Derek.

DEREK:                       0:00:24 Good morning, Vicky.

HOST:                        0:00:25 What are the big ticket items happening in the world of speech and language therapy this month?

DEREK:                      0:00:29 I think, as the summer has come to an end, at UK level, for policy affecting England, the biggest item in the box has continued to be SEND reform, Specialist Education Needs & Disability, and always the case with these matters that there’s a public conversation and there’s a more private conversation. The public conversation has continued to focus on parents’ concerns about specialist provision for children who need it and the legal guarantees that come with current Education Health & Care Plans. Into that has come an interesting document this week from Speech & Language UK, the partner charity of ours, with good principles for what a new system needs to report.

                                    Into it has also come the report of the House of Commons Education Select Committee, a report called Solving the SEND Crisis. And there we’re very pleased, because we put in extensive evidence on that and actually pretty much everything that we asked for and said in our evidence has found its way into the committee’s report, in particular, as far back as 2022, we said that there were six different areas that need to be addressed in terms of making the SEND system workable and all of those have been picked up.

                                    The wider coalition that we’re part of, called SEND in The Specialists, which is about ensuring that all the different professions that are needed in school are there, have welcomed it too, particularly the idea of a joint SEND workforce plan. 

                                    That public discourse has been good positive ideas, at the same time parents continuing to say we will want specialist provision for our child with the guarantees. Privately, of course, and can’t tell everything that we talk about privately, but we are in conversation with Government officials. In particular to say, look, if we are going to shift to something more like a comprehensive targeted offer of speech and language therapy in every school, what is that going to look like? Now the white paper proposal to legislate, because this will mean amendment to the 2014 Children & Families Act, that was originally stated for the summer, then we were told after the summer, we were hearing October, now we’re told that progress is slow and much is the way of these things, particularly when they’re controversial. So that will continue.

                                    As I’ve always said, what goes on in England is often mirrored by what’s going on in other nations, and it’s certainly the case in Northern Ireland right now that there’s – in statements there’s been another policy statement from the minister around special educational needs. And, because in Northern Ireland ministers almost been a bit more public for funding in the budget, the ministers also called for investment in SEN, there’s no ‘D’ in Northern Ireland. But the Northern Ireland policy statement nods to the fact that one in five children now have, what in Northern Ireland would still be called the Statement, and there has been further chat over the summer, chat, policy discussion over the summer about the increased prevalence of children and young people with special educational needs and with disability, and particularly the level of neurodiversity diagnosis, and that continues to be a live debate.

                                    Where I’m mentioning Northern Ireland, I should also say that the Health Minister has asked Professor Cass, who did the Cass Report on gender identity in young people in England, to take a look at Northern Ireland services.

                                    More proactively, but linking into the second big area, which continues to be a focus at English level, will be the current ongoing set of reforms around the NHS England 10-Year Plan and then, flowing out of that, the Workforce Plan. We, along with many professional bodies, sent a letter to the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, talking about the need to engage with professional bodies in the development of the Workforce Plan and we have a meeting we’re going to next week and we understand, as I speak to you on the Friday morning, 26 September, imminently a consultation on the Workforce Plan will be coming out and that we’ll take a look at that sometime in October.

                                    ICBs being clustered together, the list is now out. If you care, you can go and look on the website and see which two to three ICBs are, at this stage, clustering but then merging. Further down the track, the discussion goes on about what will still be commissioned by ICBs and what will be moved elsewhere. And then the third limb of this is Neighbourhood Health Services, where pilots are now beginning, we had a chance to look at the specification for some aspects of children’s services in neighbouring health and adult services too, and that triple of the 10-Year Plan, Neighbourhood Health Services and the Workforce Plan, combined with ICB reform, continues to be what we have to try and engage with in the English context.

                                    The last thing I’m going to mention is in Scotland, about children. We have published a report with partners around children’s services in Scotland. I’m really pleased with this. It’s taken a long time but it’s brought together the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland, the Directors of Allied Health in Scotland, the lead speech and language therapists in children’s work, which had input from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, to get those partners to sign up to a joint partnership statement around the role of communication in learning, around wellbeing, around vision and principles for change, for sustainable models of early intervention and collaboration. Took a long time but I’m really pleased that the partnership document we’ve got on children’s services in Scotland is a basis for going forward.

HOST:                        0:06:14 And something else exciting that’s been happening recently, I hear that the Communication Access UK accreditation and training that we have, has been used as part of National Inclusion Week, which was 15-21 September. Can you tell us more?

HOST:                        0:06:28 I’m sure listeners would be aware, but to remind everybody, Communication Access UK, it’s an accreditation and measured training package supporting the accreditation, a set of principles which help organisations reach a basic level of awareness and understanding in their workforce relating to communication, disability and difference. It’s been going for a few years now and currently hosted by the Royal College, that’s going to change in future but we remain committed to the scheme. 

And, yes, just recently, National Inclusion Week, which is about helping employers, was used as a hook, according to Northern Ireland, in the Northern Ireland Assembly, but actually with parliamentarians from different parts of the UK, to learn about and focus on the Communication Access Scheme. I also had the pleasure at the Scottish Members Day recently in Perth, to hear about the way that Communication Access UK has been rolled out across the city of Dundee, with different organisations and agencies, very inspiring, and we are also on track, this winter, to finally produce the Welsh language version of Communication Access UK material. That’s all exciting.

We’re seeking resources right now to make sure that we can develop and grow Communication Access UK into the future.

HOST:                        0:07:44 Thank you. I wonder, what else will our regular listeners and new listeners find useful?

DEREK:                      0:07:51 I have been forcefully reminded, and it’s also a pleasure, to say to listeners RCSLT Conference will be at the end of November. Hundreds and hundreds of people have already signed up and it’s online, so there’s no limit to how many can come. Please do consider signing up for RCSLT Conference: 80 years and beyond, on 26 and 27 November. We’ve frozen the prices. Right now you’re still under Early Bird pricing. There is, as always, a scientific programme, where members are able to put forward their research abstracts and their proper research. There are also sessions created by the RCSLT, and those are going to include the latest on AI, on SEND reform, on communication in adult SLT, on justice and just adding a session on the latest evidence on screen time. If you want to be involved in any of those, please make sure you sign up to conference.

HOST:                        0:08:43 Thank you. Okay, just to let listeners know what happening next with the podcast, we have DLD Awareness Day coming up on 17 October and we’ll be doing stuff for that as the Royal Collage. But we’ll also be releasing an international journal article podcast, which is about DLD. The title is ‘It depends on who I’m with’: How young people with developmental language disorder describe their experiences of language and communication in school. And we interview two of the authors, Anna Ekström and Olof Sandgren. That’s coming roundabout 13 October.

                                    And then the next new podcast will be on 16 October, guest starring our CEO, Steve Jones. Look forward to those. Thank you very much.

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