About the project
RCSLT has worked to understand the children and young people’s (CYP) SLT workforce. As part of a Health Education England (HEE) funded programme to support allied health professions (AHP) workforce reform priorities, the RCSLT collected the required data to write a report, to better understand the CYP workforce and the links into education.
Read more about the overall workforce reform programme.
Purpose
The purpose of this project was to understand the numbers of SLTs working with CYP in education, in different settings, clinical areas and NHS or non-NHS.
Project outcomes
In November 2022, the RCSLT launched ‘Horizon’ – an online membership profile which captures a wide variety of workforce data. Data was collected from November 2022 to March 2023.
A total of around 13% of RCSLT members completed their online membership profile. It should be noted that this is a small dataset so the report should be interpreted as highlighting the importance of further data collection to understand the SLT CYP workforce.
The following reports were included in the analysis of the data collection:
- SLTs working with CYP in the NHS
- SLTs working with CYP by NHS band FTE
- Service user groups SLTs worked with
- Clinical areas of SLTs working with CYP
- Working patterns of SLTs working with CYP
- Contractual position of SLTs working with CYP
- Job titles of SLTs working with CYP
Some highlights from the analysis include:
- There is a fair spread of SLTs between Band 5 to Band 7 but there are significantly less SLTs in Band 8a, 8b and 8c roles
- The data collected around settings suggest that the proportion of SLTs drops off as CYP progress through to secondary school from primary school. Figures then drop further post-secondary school to further education up to 18. Further analysis is required around why this is as there may be other funding streams delivering services into this group.
- The majority of members work in the following clinical areas: language disorder, neurodevelopmental conditions, including autism and ADHD, social communication disorders and speech sound disorder.
RCSLT will continue to collect data through the RCSLT online membership profile to capture more rich data, for a better representation and understanding of the workforce.
