We’re working with community health providers to help government primary schools:
- give young children better access to speech pathology services
- increase teacher understanding, skills and confidence to support children who have speech, language and communication needs.
Select primary schools will receive more than 35,000 hours of face to face speech pathology support for students.
The initial program will run for four years and conclude at the end of June 2022.
Locations
The program will run in these areas:
- Mallee
- Wimmera South West
- Inner Gippsland
- Outer Gippsland
We recognise there is demand for similar services in other areas. We’re running an evaluation of this program to measure its effectiveness. The results of the evaluation will inform any future plans to expand the service.
Funding
The 2018-19 state budget included $8.2 million over four years to procure external speech pathology services for Victorian government schools.
Background
According to the School Entrant Health Questionnaire, 14.1% of parents reported that their child has speech and language needs in 2017.
Oral language is key to learning to read and write, and is critical for supporting the development of children’s early literacy skills. A lack of proficient literacy has far reaching consequence for students and society.