Reflection: As you read through this Child File, reflect on your knowledge and understanding of DLD.
How well can you identify DLD in the classroom?
How do you address the needs of children and young people with DLD?
How could you do this better?
Setting the scene
At the recent ‘Every Child Included’ conference, there was an afternoon session on exclusions and youth offenders. One of the participants mentioned Speech and Language Therapy (SaLT) and a ripple went around the room. Many in the audience made comments about the impact this provision was having on the engagement of young people in services. There were also some puzzled looks and possibly thoughts along the lines of ‘What? Do young offenders all have lisps or stammers?’
And of course, it is not lisps and stammers that keep SaLT who work in Youth Offending Teams (YOT) busy, but language. It is widely reported that somewhere between 60 to 80 per cent of young offenders have language and communication needs, although some samples have reported 90 to 100 per cent. Time and time again, stories are told of young people with severe difficulties with language who reach the criminal justice system and no one has assessed their language.
So how did we get to this situation?
Perhaps surprisingly, for a field which is all about language, there has been great confusion about terminology. There has been a profusion of terms quite often used in different ways to mean different things. This lack of clarity directly impacted on awareness, identification and service provision. A couple of years ago, a group of academics led by Professors Dorothy Bishop and Maggie Snowling from Oxford conducted an international consensus process, and agreement eventually settled on the term, ‘Developmental Language Disorder’.1 ‘Developmental’ was chosen as it indicates that it is a condition that has a neuro-developmental basis. ‘Disorder’ was chosen over ‘delay’ as it gives it more parity with other conditions. And additionally, ‘delay’ gives the impression that a child or young person will catch up at some point.
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) can be applied to describe language difficulties that create barriers to learning or everyday life and, although they are unlikely to resolve by 5 years of age, they are not associated with another neuro-developmental condition such as ASD or Down Syndrome. There is enormous movement in early development and this makes the diagnosis trickier, but careful monitoring of Early Years children is still advised. Around 7.5 per cent of all children are thought to have DLD. This equates to two children in every class.2