Our Collaborate workstream ran during academic year 2023/24 and was developed to bring focus to improving speech, language and communication needs in ELC. We knew from national data and what members had been telling us that this was a priority area for improvement.
We ran themed learning sessions with 4 identified local authorities from September 2023 to June 2024 to dig deep into our emerging theory of change shown below. Details of the sessions were also shared on our Glow site for you to use locally. We also ran a QI Learning Group that used this as the theme throughout, allowing individuals to develop QI Skills while digging into a subject matter relevant to the whole group.
We continue to have a dedicated channel on our Teams site where we can share and learn together from Quality Improvement work across the country that relates to speech, language and communication (SLC). We will continue to share our learning with colleagues in Scottish Government and the regional leads in Education Scotland to ensure our communication and offers of support are aligned and helpful to you.
This work developed as a result of the CYPIC Conference in November 2022. This event included a presentation from Public Health Scotland sharing their latest data and confirming that this is now a public health issue. We therefore held a themed breakout session to consider how QI can be used to improve SLC in the early years. We have collated the feedback you gave us during the event and used it to develop the driver diagram. We also heard about how East Ayrshire has taken a whole system approach to the issue and saw a video showing how this has impacted in their ELC services: Supporting early communication in East Ayrshire.
