Are we meeting the challenge? An evaluation of SLT services for bilingual children in 3 centres of population.

Abstract

This study investigates the current speech and language therapy (SLT) service to bilingual children within three cities in the United Kingdom (UK), i.e. two in Scotland (S1 and S2) and one in England (E1), and specifically addresses whether speech and language therapists (SLTs) believe that their service meets the professional guidelines of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT). Through a combination of interviews, postal questionnaires, and Census data, information was gathered about the SLT paediatric service provision in each of these cities. For each of the three centres we established: (i) the % of monolingual and bilingual children in the population, (ii) the % of bilingual and monolingual children on the SLT caseload, (iii) the languages spoken by the bilingual children on the caseload, and (iv) whether SLTs in these cities believe that their service is currently meeting the RCSLT guidelines.