Early years: speech, language and communication action plan

Why Are We Producing This Action Plan?

Despite Scotland’s strong policy foundations and excellent early years programmes, persistent inequalities remain in early child development, with speech, language and communication being of primary concern and inter-connected with other aspects of development.

This Action Plan sets out a clear national commitment to close the SLC developmental gap through coordinated action, leadership and community empowerment, with an increased focus on prevention. Delivering improvements in early SLC is not an isolated priority. It is embedded within our whole-system approach to Early Childhood Development, underpinned by national efforts to tackle child poverty and address disadvantage from the earliest stages of life.

In conversations with local leaders (including ELC, SLT and Health Visiting leads), several barriers have been identified, including workforce capacity, fragmented planning processes, inconsistent access to data and a lack of shared tools across sectors. In some areas, services face difficulties reaching families at greatest risk of SLC concerns and practitioners may lack confidence in promoting early communication. This Plan seeks to address those barriers by providing national leadership, common frameworks and stronger alignment across systems.

Source: co-produced by the NELC team and the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) Scotland (2024)