Switching on the language light

By Hannah Richardson
Education reporter, BBC News

As a report calls for all primary and secondary school children to be assessed for speech problems, one mother explains how speech therapy helped her son.

For the first two years of his life, Bruce was a very difficult child.

Bruce is a much happier child these days

"He was withdrawing into himself and he wasn't really speaking. He was just mostly screaming," his mother Denise Davidson says.

"At the age of 18 months, the one word he could say was 'light', strangely enough.

"I had an older child, so I was aware that at that stage he should be much further on. He did not seem to develop in the way the other one had."

Someone the family knew mentioned autism and so Mrs Davidson began looking it up on the internet.

"He just seemed to tick all the boxes."

So she went to the doctor, near the family home in North Shields on Tyneside.

"Things just took off from there," says Mrs Davidson. "Everything seemed to swing into action."

It was recommended that he see a speech and language therapist who visited the house once a fortnight and that he attend a specialist nursery supported by the communication charity ICAN.

"It was the ICAN nursery and the speech therapist that just turned things around."

It was as if a light had been switched on Bruce's mother, Denise Davidson School pupil speech testing urged

Over the next two years, thanks to some intensive support, he started to talk and developed his communication.

"They helped him understand simple things like on, under, in."

Eventually he was diagnosed as having high functioning autism and Asperger's syndrome.

"This means that he is academically quite gifted but that his social skills and communication is below par."

But thanks to the intervention of the speech and language experts, he has managed to overcome some of the syndrome's impairments and now, aged five and a half, attends a mainstream school.

The Davidsons were arguably the lucky ones. According to John Bercow's review of speech and language provision not all areas are so well prepared to respond to family's concerns.

Mrs Davidson says: "Once he got his communication, he amazed us with what he could do. It was as if a light had been switched on.

'Much happier'

"Academically he is higher than his age group for maths and amazingly for vocabulary and reading."

Bruce's school is aware of his needs and he has one-to-one support from a teaching assistant.

His mother says: "He's a much happier child. It's just amazing to see.

"He used to be this little thing that just wanted to sit in the middle of the floor playing with his cars, now he interacts with people and he's really quite sociable."

She adds: "Language really does equal life chances. Without communication - be it sign language or the spoken word - without it children can't learn."