Children with speech disorders are being let down by the island’s health and education departments, say parents and an MHK.

A mother, who doesn’t want to be named, believes ministers are doing ’an appalling job’ in supporting primary school children like her daughter who require regular speech therapy, as a business plan to reduce waiting times has not been created.

This follows the Department of Health and Social Care admitting earlier this month that it’s yet to complete such a plan for the Speech and Language Therapy Service.

The current waiting time for appointments for initial assessments is four months, unless urgent.

Garff MHK Daphne Caine, the former children’s champion, told the Examiner: ’The health and education departments are letting children down and certainly not providing the level of speech and language therapy required.

’I think it is imperative that the DHSC confirms when its business plan will be completed, and more importantly, when the Speech and Language Therapy Service will be properly resourced to meet the needs of island children.’

In January the DHSC announced that speech and language therapy intervention in schools had been ’significantly’ reduced due to an imbalance between staffing and demand.

Since then no increase in the number of therapists in the service has been made and about 150 children are now on the waiting list.

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Michelle Breed, head of therapies, wrote a letter to special education needs coordinators and headteachers on September 6, which said a speech and language therapist had been recruited to cover the maternity leave. This has enabled the service to ’return to its established level of staff’, she said.

Due to rising demand, she said, a business case is being completed to increase staff numbers with new models of care delivery being looked at to address waiting times.

A mother wrote to Mrs Caine saying that at the start of this year her daughter’s speech therapy time was cut from every week of a school term to a term on, term off basis.

’Now six, she received excellent speech therapy in the summer term 2019 from a therapist from the speech and language team after having not received any therapy in the spring term,’ she wrote.

She said her daughter was due for an assessment at the start of this term, but it has not taken place.

A therapist, she said, had told her there were no plans to offer her daughter an update assessment.

’The health and education ministers are doing an appalling job and this government should be thoroughly ashamed of the way in which it is failing children who need their help,’ she said.

’It is disgraceful to read that eight months after a review was commenced a business case for more therapists has still not been prepared.’

Mrs Caine agrees that ’urgent action’ from the departments is needed.

’This impacts hugely on the individual children concerned in terms of their scholastic achievement and social integration but also on whole classes where teaching staff have to support additional needs seemingly without additional resource,’ she said.

She added that she has ’sympathy’ for those working in the service who have ’unmanageable case loads’ and have to decide which children will have therapy withdrawn or not started.

She believes that an appointment of an independent children’s commissioner should be considered to better protect the rights of all children, as this issue falls out of the remit of the current children’s champion.