A GROUP of private nurseries in Scotland has employed a speech and language therapist to tackle increasing problems amongst pre-school children.
The Bertram Nursery Group, which runs 16 Scottish nurseries, has established a programme of activity and support for those children in its care who are finding language difficult.
The move comes after research showed more than one million children and young people - nearly three in every classroom - have some form of persistent language challenge, with early years support seen as critical.
The Bertram Group is also now training all of its staff to identify speech, language and communications problems in under-fives.
Graeme Scott, chief executive said: "The value and importance of quality pre-school education is being increasingly understood and as a childcare provider we take our role extremely seriously.
"Having introduced a speech and language therapist on our staff, we have had tremendous feedback from parents, and it is for that reason that we are increasing our investment in the initiative. We are seeing that with the support of speech therapy, a child can gain in self-esteem, preparing them for school and where there are communications difficulties, the earlier interventions are implemented the lesser impact these difficulties will have."
Maeve Murray, the group's speech and language therapist, carries out individual assessments for children presenting difficulties, providing support and onward referral if required.
She also puts in place strategies within the nurseries to encourage communication development.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article