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Learning to talk and understand words feels like “an impossible hurdle” for around 2 million children in the UK. And that number is 35 per cent higher than three years ago, according to by the organisation Speech and Language UK.

Part of this increase can be seen in the well-documented rise in the number of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), with one-fifth of the school population now needing SEND support - a 31.2 per cent increase since 2016. According to government data, speech, language and communication needs are a large driver of this increase.

But there are plenty of children of that 2 million who won’t be in those SEND statistics. Jane Harris, CEO of Speech and Language UK, explains that speech, language and communication challenges are increasingly being experienced by children who don’t have SEND.

“There are environmental factors that could cause a child to have problems with talking and understanding words that aren’t due to SEND,” she says. “It’s not necessarily a medical issue.”

Yet these difficulties can be hugely detrimental. Because speech and language skills are “the bedrock of learning, we know that if you’re behind in language aged 5, you’re six times more likely to be behind in English aged 11, and 11 times more likely to be behind in maths”, Harris says.

She adds that those with speech and language challenges have double the mental health risk and half the employment rate of those who don’t, while two-thirds of young offenders experience speech and language difficulties.

“We’re really seeing what’s at stake if we don’t get upstream on this problem,” Harris says.

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Schools are seeing the challenges first-hand.

At Ted Wragg Multi-Academy Trust, which has 18 academies in the South West, Kylie Rio-Wood, trust lead for speech and language (and a trained speech and language therapist), says the number of children presenting with these needs “has got catastrophically larger” in recent years.

Looking at the data from one of the trust’s primaries in Plymouth, Rio-Wood says that in 2022 six children in Reception were identified as having speech-sound errors. In 2023, that number had doubled to 12. In 2024 it was 19.

The trust is seeing that “gradual increase across all the schools we work with”, she says.

It’s a similar picture in other parts of the country. Jack Moore, principal of Gooseacre Primary Academy in South Yorkshire (part of Astrea Academy Trust), tells Tes he now expects between 20 and 50 per cent of each cohort to have these challenges.

In some classes that proportion is even higher. Nicky Turner, early years foundation stage lead at Astrea, explains that of a class of 30, “in some of our settings, all those children have speech and language delay”.

Identifying speech and language difficulties

The ways in which children present with these challenges are numerous.

Harris says teachers have reported that more children are starting school unable to respond to their name, but instead answering to “baby” or “love”.

Moore says he is seeing more children with speech delays; for example, EYFS children who won’t speak at all, and key stage 2 children who only speak in one- or two-word utterances “rather than whole sentences”.

‘In some of our settings, all children have speech and language delay’

Rio-Wood explains that a common language difficulty she sees in Reception-age children is an inability to follow a two-part instruction.

“If the teacher says, ‘Put your bags away and sit down on the carpet,’ they’re not going to be able to follow that - let alone learn or have any understanding of the curriculum.”

She adds that she has noticed an increase in speech-sound errors such as fronting and backing.

Fronting is when a child produces sounds that should be made at the back of their mouth - such as “k” and “g” - at the front; for example, saying “tar” instead of “car”. Backing is when they produce sounds that should be made at the front - such as “t” and “s” - at the back.

“We expect [these errors] in early age, around 3. But they’re being prolonged,” she says, adding that she is also seeing more children stammering and stuttering, affecting fluency of speech.

Challenges in secondary

But speech and language challenges aren’t just apparent in EYFS and primary children, says Catherine Berwick, SEND lead at Inspiration Trust, which runs 18 schools in East Anglia.

The challenge for secondary schools is that by this stage of education, a lot of language difficulties have become “invisible”, Berwick says. Typically, speech-sound difficulties - which would alert a teacher to a child with these issues - “have been ironed out by then”.

“But a child might not be able to understand complex sentences,” she explains - for example, a sentence that contains “if”, figurative language or rhetorical questions.

“Once you get into difficulties like that, it’s really easy to misunderstand what someone is saying to you, and to get yourself in trouble.”

The social toll of the pandemic

Unsurprisingly, the most common reason cited by experts for this increase in speech and language difficulties is the pandemic.

The start of the first lockdown, in March 2020, is a turning point highlighted in Speech and Language UK’s research, which shows that 89 per cent of teachers have noticed a decline in speech and language development since then.

The pandemic exacerbated the speech and language challenges already being seen in areas of high deprivation, Harris says.

“You need to hear someone speaking a language” in order to learn it yourself, she explains. “In areas of deprivation, children may have fewer opportunities to do that because parents work so many jobs.”

This was a particular problem during Covid, “when people were just busier” at home, Harris says. And with schools closed, children “lost that peer-to-peer interaction” and teacher input, too.

The other important part of speech and language learning is having new experiences, Harris says. “You need new experiences to learn new vocabulary, new ways to put words together. That also dropped off during Covid” - and the decline has continued since then.

“It’s that double whammy of less social interaction and fewer new experiences. It happened to be caused by the pandemic. It’s now being caused by poverty, the cost of living and public service cuts.”

Many claim that children’s increased use of technology has also affected their speech and language development.

However, Courtenay Norbury, professor of developmental language and communication disorders at UCL, says there is no convincing data that conclusively links technology use with speech and language difficulties.

“I’m fairly sceptical about a causal relationship there, but that’s not to say that I’m advocating screens,” she says.

“In general, the time that you’re in front of a screen takes you away from things we know can be really helpful in terms of language development - talking to people, engaging with your peers.”

However, she adds that the real impact “really depends on what [children are] doing on those screens”. They can learn from narrative-based TV programmes, and “some media is supportive of language in the same way that books might be. But it’s usually better if you can watch it with an adult who can talk to you about it”.

What’s more, Norbury says that a wider understanding of speech and language challenges - both in schools and society in general - may have contributed to the rise in the numbers of children recorded as having these needs.

“It might not be that there’s an actual increase in terms of the need, but more recognition of that need,” she says.

School intervention success

Nonetheless, teachers’ experiences show that this issue is pressing. The good news is that for children experiencing speech and language difficulties due to environmental rather than medical reasons, in-school intervention is possible - and often highly effective.

About 18 months ago, Gooseacre Primary Academy overhauled its curriculum specifically to address the increase in speech and language challenges, says Moore.

These developments included teaching key vocabulary in every lesson, giving children sentence stems from which to build their own sentences, and introducing “thinking time - time to think through their answer before sharing” for every year group.

“It’s a slow process,” Moore adds. But already, in the first full academic year of the change, “we have started seeing improvements, particularly around vocabulary acquisition”.

Other settings have found success with more targeted interventions, which often start with screening children for speech and language.

At Inspiration Trust, Berwick says her colleagues use the programme WellComm to screen every child entering Reception. Once those who need extra support are identified, teaching assistants work with them one-to-one to close the gaps in their progress.

“A lot of that can be done within the classroom” during free-flow time, Berwick says, adding that those children are then reassessed in February.

After being exposed to “a communication-rich environment, plus the enhanced support, a lot will have closed those gaps”, while those who haven’t will then receive more intensive sessions out of the classroom.

The role of in-house specialists

At Ted Wragg Trust, Rio-Wood says every September her team takes two weeks to screen all new Reception and Year 7 students via a process that Rio-Wood created herself.

“We do that because we know that early identification is key, and we do it at Year 7 as well because we’re very aware that a lot of the children don’t attend our primaries,” she says.

Those children whom the screens flag as needing support then receive out-of-class intervention three times a week for six weeks. They are then assessed again - and receive another six weeks of help if they don’t pass.

“After that we find that 87 per cent of children make the progression” that takes them in line with what is expected of a child of their age, Rio-Wood says. “It’s really effective.”

Her colleague Siobhan Meredith, executive director of education at Ted Wragg Trust, says the MAT is “so lucky to have a speech and language team” who have the capacity to dedicate themselves to this work. “Not every trust will have that,” she acknowledges.

It’s a similar story at Greenfield E-ACT Primary Academy in Bristol, where headteacher Fiona Chapman says the school has invested in upskilling its own staff rather than paying “between £30,000 and £40,000 a year hiring in [speech and language therapists from] the local authority”.

Outside specialists typically don’t have “buy-in to your facility, your academy, your vision”, Chapman says. “They don’t get to know your children as individuals.” So the school has supported a number of its staff to take different levels of the Elklan speech and language qualification and has built its own specialist department in-house.

The school has not only seen improvements in children’s speech, language and communication skills but also in behaviour, explains Sendco Benjamin Taverner.

“That’s without question,” he says, adding that he has witnessed a reduction in the number of children whose frustration at not being able to communicate clearly “spills over into anger”.

The role of CPD

But for settings that do not have this resource, meeting the speech and language needs of every child is “difficult”, says Turner at Astrea.

The trust avoids taking children out for interventions because doing so means losing a valuable TA from the classroom. Instead, “any interventions happen in that classroom during children’s play and learning”.

For the past four years Turner has led termly CPD sessions on speech and language for Astrea’s EYFS teachers, TAs and literacy leads. The training covers theory, as well as practical examples such as “games you could use to develop vocabulary” and “serve-and-return conversations”.

This training is “making a massive difference”, Turner says. “This year we’ve had certain schools with no children on track for the GLD [good level of development]” when they arrive in September.

“But at this point in the year, we’ve now got 65 per cent of children that are looking like they’re going to achieve the GLD at the end of the year.”

The burden on early years practitioners

This is progress in the right direction - but it’s not easy. “Our lives as early years teachers are getting harder and harder because the starting points are so low,” Turner says.

“We might be having to do two or three years’ progress in one school year to get them to where they need to be. It’s a really daunting task.”

Research shows that for speech and language, early intervention is key - and so Turner thinks the single most effective solution from government would be “more money in the early years for more adults” in each classroom.

Neil Leitch, CEO of the Early Years Alliance, is in agreement, telling Tes: “If we are to have any chance in tackling these concerning trends, it is vital the early years sector gets the investment it needs to deliver the best possible care and education to all children at the very start of their learning journeys.”

‘The most speech and language training we know of in a PGCE is two hours - it’s ridiculous’

Margaret Mulholland, SEND and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, adds that she, too, is “concerned by reports of arrested language development”.

Another possible solution lies in schools having “better access to speech and language therapists, who can intervene and provide specialist support at an early stage”, she says.

Meanwhile, Norbury thinks the answer lies in better training. “I’d love to see a change to initial teacher training, so that teachers have a really good grounding in learning how to do things like scaffold lessons so that you can provide additional boosts for those kids who are behind.”

Harrison at Speech and Language UK - whose research shows that half of teachers think their training in this area was inadequate - agrees. “The most [speech and language] training we know of in a PGCE is two hours - it’s ridiculous.”

Plea for government action

What’s clear is that all these solutions require government intervention - work the Department for Education says is already under way.

“We are already making progress through our Nuffield Early Language Intervention programme, which provides support with speech and language development for tens of thousands of children in Reception,” a spokesperson says.

They are also “working with NHS England on a pilot project for wider language support for children in primary school”, although, they add, these changes “will take time”.

This work will be worth it, says Chapman at Greenfield E-ACT Primary Academy, who explains that solving this “national crisis” sooner rather than later makes long-term economic sense given the extent to which the research connects speech and language challenges with unemployment and youth offending.

“[The government has] got to make financial investments now that are prudent.”

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