I had an email from a lovely SENCo that said “We love the look of your training, but our school is not in a good place budget-wise at the moment.”
I understand. School budgets have always been tight and funding doesn’t cover near enough the demands on schools to provide education to children with a range of needs and requirements.
The expectations on schools to provide inclusive environments for children with a range of needs and requirements are high, however the training and support for schools to meet those needs are shockingly low. After one of my training sessions in a local school, one teacher told me “I’ve been a teacher for 25 years and that was the first training on speech and language I’ve had!”.
Providing training and easy-to-access speech and language information to schools has always been a top priority for me. I’ve been delivering face-to-face training on a range of topics to schools in my local area for over 15 years and I was delighted to find a way to create speech and language training courses that education professionals in schools all over the UK (and beyond) could access in their own time, and access multiple times with the same login. (See the Online Courses page on my website for more information).
If you need to convince the Headteacher or Business Manager of your school that the speech and language training course or resources you’ve seen available for instant access on my website NEED to be purchased and they respond with “we don’t have the budget” ask them "which budget?"
In the past, schools have purchased my vital speech and language training and resources through a number of budgets. Here’s a selection of school funds for you to mention to the Business Manager:
SEN Budget- lots of schools have a tiny SEN budget. You can point out that the training you’re keen on is good value for money as you will be able to use it with your children now, and in the future. The Education Endowment Foundation carried out research and found that children made progress measurable in MONTHS over a single year after SLCN approaches in schools. They also state that speech & language is the most cost-effective training on a cost-per-child basis.
Pupil Premium Budget- did you know that more than half of children from socially deprived areas start school with impoverished speech, language and communication needs? You probably have 2 or 3 children from your class in mind already who would benefit. You could present this as whole-school data to the Board of Governors for your school and show how you can meet the SLCN needs of your PP children through High Quality Teaching and Learning when staff apply the knowledge and strategies learnt through my SLCN course.
Training and CPD Budget- well it is staff training after all, and you can train your whole team with my training package. Some of my schools use my online training courses during their staff meetings and other settings have trained up newer members of staff who will be working as 1:1 with children.
Other Premiums- because there are so many children whose skills have been impacted by the pandemic, justification for speech and language training to help staff catch up the children who need a little boost could be easily applied for this budget. You can support X number of children by assessing and monitoring them using the tools in the SLCN Impact Pack, for example.
I know lots of schools have very tight budget constraints but investing in staff by providing training will not only help your current cohorts of children, but for future years to come too.
Find out about my training packages here:
Beth Morrant MSc BA (Hons) CertMRCSLT MASLTIP is a Highly Specialist Paediatric Speech and Language Therapist with extensive experience working with children and schools.