Ms Claire Mortell:

I am going to take the issue of recruitment and retention and link that with the interconnected framework because they go hand in hand. We need to acknowledge that there is a shortage of health and social care professionals nationally, not only within disability services. While CDNTs are facing recruitment challenges, we know that is not the case for every team. There is some strategic planning that needs to happen for specific CDNTs where retention or recruitment appears to be a significant challenge while we have other teams that are able to recruit quite successfully.

There is definitely space to do more investigation into the challenges and why they might arise.

We absolutely welcome the opening of more university placements in order to have more recruitment of SLTs, but we also need to acknowledge that we need to make the disability services sector an attractive one in which to work. To do that, we need to take the learning from what we have seen to date, and feedback from our members who have experienced difficulties working within disability services, particularly children’s disability services, that highlights that robust clinical governance structures were not in place from the outset. They felt unsupported in their work and that they were carrying additional risk, and that led to a lot of burnout and poor retention. Moving forward into a therapy support service in education, we need to take the learning from the feedback.

Additionally, our members continually highlight that they want to do the work that they were trained to do, and that is to work directly with the children and families. It entails considering the model of service and ensuring we are getting down to where we want to be, working directly with the children and families. That leads to the matter of the interconnected framework. If we have two systems, with therapists working with schools and therapists working on our CDNTs, it is already a very confusing system for families to navigate. They ask whether they now have two speech and language therapists and who does what. There needs to be very clear direction for the therapists working in education and those working on CDNTs. We need to examine our resources because we know that recruitment and retention comprise a challenge. We need to make the best use we can of the resources we have, and that is going to take a lot of work. This means examining what the schools and CDNTs are providing and asking whether, if there are children accessing therapy in school, it means the CDNTs can put more emphasis on early intervention services and children who are not able to access school. There is just a lot of work that needs to be teased out. We very much welcome it. We have been involved in the early stages of the discussion, which was most welcome, but we need clarity on the roles and responsibilities. A very specific framework for working between health and education is critical.