Transcript Name:
RCSLT News June 2024
Transcript Date:
27 June 2024
Speaker Key (delete/anonymise if not required):
HOST: VICTORIA HARRIS
DEREK: DEREK MUNN
MUSIC PLAYS: 0:00:00-0:00:07
HOST: 0:00:07 Hello and welcome to the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists news podcast for June 2024. It’s Friday, 21 June. I’m Vicky Harris, the Head of Learning at the RCSLT, and I’m here with my colleague, Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs, and we’re going to have our monthly chat about what’s going on in the world of speech and language therapy. Good morning.
DEREK: 0:00:29 Good morning, Vicky.
HOST: 0:00:30 The day after our May podcast, the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, announced a general election and we had been pontificating about when that might be. And when we meet again for our podcast in July, we’ll know how that has played out. But for now, why is the general election important to speech and language therapy, please, Derek?
DEREK: 0:00:50 Yes, indeed, Vicky. If you’d asked me a month ago when we did the last podcast, I would’ve confidently told you that the election would be in the autumn, probably in November, like many other people who work in politics.
And then the following day, the Wednesday, Steve [Inaudible 0:01:08] and I were meeting a political contact who used to be an MP and we were discussing the rumours swirling around Westminster and going, but surely not, surely not. But it was, it was true.
So here we are now, as we record less than two weeks from the election date. Does it matter to speech and language therapy who is the Government of the United Kingdom? Yes. Undoubtedly it will determine an approach. Undoubtedly it will determine a philosophy. I think we need to be clear that neither of the parties most likely to win are really promising to turn on the funding taps in a way that we might have seen in previous decades.
It’s also worth saying that the officials, the civil servants, who are key partners for us with whom we work, will be the same even if the ministers change political colour, so we want to keep those relationships going.
In terms of what the parties are promising, the Liberal Democrats have what I think is an interesting proposal around SEND, Special Educational Needs and Disability, in England and around giving local authorities more strategic powers in that regard, so they get some power to go with the accountability.
There are some interesting things that we need to be aware of if Labour are successful. First of all, as we had hoped, there is a pledge in the Labour manifesto to fund evidence based early language interventions in every primary school in England. And that’s potentially massive but we need to be involved in trying to shape that and make it into something which is truly evidence based, works for all kids and is useful. We also need to keep an eye out, for example, on the mental health champions that are going to be expanded in schools. And Wes Streeting’s proposal to bring down waiting lists involves allowing health staff to voluntary work additional shifts in the evenings and at weekends. And, as a speech and language therapy profession, we need to decide whether we want to be part of that initiative.
HOST: 0:03:32 Great, thank you. And what are the asks from the RCSLT of our members and stakeholders?
DEREK: 0:03:39 If you’re interested in this stuff and you look at our website, you’ll see what we call say a policy call. Because the manifestos were decided months ago and the manifestos are already out. This is as much about the calls that we will be making of the new MPs and the new Government, although please do feel free to take them to your candidates in the remaining time now. And they are, as you would expect, around investment in speech and language therapy, about rehab, community rehab, which is still not featuring in the debate in the way that we think it needs to, around the extension of prescribing rights to SLTs and others. And we also make an ask of candidates and [inaudible 0:04:19] MPs to do the Communication Access UK training and to make sure that they know the basics of interacting with people with communication challenges.
These are mostly England, but clearly Communication Access UK is a UK wide thing and prescribing rights would be a UK wide thing. And any investment increase in England has knock-on consequences in the budgets of the devolved nations.
HOST: 0:04:48 Thank you. As always, I will put a link to the Communication Access training in the show notes so that people can find where that is.
So, how can people get involved in making the case for speech and language therapy during the election?
DEREK: 0:05:03 In whatever way you choose but, to try and make it easy for you, if you do want to contact candidates in your area just to bring our issues to their attention, if you go to that same page that will be in the show notes, then there are links there where you can really easily set up what we call an e-Action and bring issues around speech and language to your candidate’s attention.
HOST: 0:05:28 And I will include a link to that as well. Okay, so that’s going to be keeping us busy but there’s other stuff happening. What’s happening around the UK that we need to know about please?
DEREK: 0:05:41 Carrying on, first of all, with Westminster. We spoke last month about a petition that had been brought forward by a big service user advocate, Mikey Akers, and had been chosen by the Parliament Petitions Committee for a debate on investment on speech and language therapy. That’s been set to one side because of the action but we were going to revisit that after.
We’ve also got stuff going on in the adult space in England, where we’re working with NHSE to try and influence on safer staffing, on the implementation of the workforce plan. And there are various things going on in the stroke area where, for example, it’s coming up to time for [Inaudible 0:06:20], which is a big thing in the world of stroke.
On the children’s side, we are pleased that, following the ongoing engagement we’ve had, including with the current Health Minister, NHS England have a new three-year workstream transforming children and young people’s community services. Now it flows out of waiting lists and waiting times in children’s services, but it enables us to say, you’ve got to think about timely access, you’ve got to think about early intervention, you’ve got to remember that waiting lists are a symptom not a cause and that you need to deal with the demand and capacity, which underlies long waits and long times. We’re represented on the clinical advisory group that met for the first time yesterday.
Also in the children’s space, the Department for Education noted in England an 11% increase in Education Health and Care Plans and the skew that makes to funding and resource and there was some ongoing news coverage about the challenges around the EHCPs and the SEND system in England. SEND has also been front and centre in Northern Ireland in the news this week.
In Scotland, we held the VoiceBox competition, the children’s joke telling competition, in the Scottish Parliament. Hugely successful, 50 members of the Scottish Parliament were at the photocall, a number were in the room hearing children from their constituencies and regions, some with communication challenge, some not, telling jokes and raising the profile of speech and language. It’s a really valuable event, the first time we’ve done it in Edinburgh.
In Wales, a couple of the Senedd committees have praised the role of speech and language therapy in Flying Start, which continues in Wales. Have continued to pressure the Welsh Government to move on the SLT role in youth justice and we’re really, really pleased that what’s been going on, on a secondment basis, for some years now, the Talk with me programme, led by speech and language therapists, embedded in Welsh Government and we’ve now got that made permanent, which we’re delighted about.
That would be my quick run around the UK.
HOST: 0:08:30 Thank you, that’s fabulous. We will meet again on 19 July for our next news podcast. Just to let listeners know that we have a growing catalogue of podcasts, both research-based and topical, so do please listen when you get a chance. And you can do that via your favourite podcast app or by going to our home site, which is soundcloud.com/RCSLT, where you will find everything arranged as handy playlists. Thank you very much until next time.
MUSIC PLAYS: 0:08:30-0:09:12
ENDS