Speech & Language Link in Suffolk
Suffolk Delivering Better Value (DBV) funding for Speech & Language Link
Suffolk County Council has been awarded funding under The Department for Education (DfE) Delivering Better Value (DBV) Programme, which aims to support local authorities to improve outcomes for children and young people using evidence-based interventions.
The Delivering Better Value (DBV) team supports the roll-out of interventions for children attending school who are not yet at Age Related Expectation (ARE) for maths or literacy, emotional wellbeing or speech and language development. They aim to help Suffolk schools close that gap, by using effective, targeted, evidence-based interventions and Speech & Language Link is the preferred speech, language and communication package.
Pete McLeod, from Speech & Language Link says: “We are delighted our Speech & Language Link packages have been chosen by Suffolk County Council. It is vitally important that speech and language are supported both at school entry and beyond which is why our whole school approach to SLCN is embedded into the support that we offer at Reception, Infant and Junior levels“
Welcome to all the primary schools that are accessing the part-funding of Language Link or Speech Link and thank you to the DBV team. We look forward to working with you and the Suffolk primary schools in 2024/25.
Speech & Language Link was started over 20 years ago with the creation of our first assessment and intervention toolkit for speech sound support. We have grown considerably and now in addition to the speech package we provide a whole school approach to SLCN with a range of standardised language assessments, interventions, training and ongoing SaLT support within Infant, Junior and Secondary Language Link. We’re also in the process of developing a new package, Little Link, which will support preschool children between the ages of 3 and 5, and restandardising Reception Language Link for September 2025. Thousands of UK schools actively use Speech & Language Link and last year they completed over 230,000 assessments, identifying about 90,000 pupils who could benefit from our targeted intervention programmes.