Our pre-school project aims to help more speech and language therapy departments provide a better service for stammering.

Pre-school Dysfluency Campaign

In the PSDC, started in February 2003, we investigated and analysed the standard of services for preschool dysfluent children provided by Primary Care Trusts throughout England.

The results are available in the Pre-school dysfluency campaign report (pdf file, 4.66MB), 2006.

'Every Child's Chance at Fluency'

The PSDC showed that although some speech and language therapy services for young dysfluent children are good, unfortunately many are not.

We hope by this project, which we have called 'Every Child's Chance at Fluency' (ECCF), that we can help to abolish the present 'post code lottery' which exists across the country, so that every dysfluent child will have an equal chance of effective therapy.

We have begun by asking six Primary Care Trusts to work with us to implement systems of best practice as identified by the PSDC findings. All the speech and language therapists in these Trusts who work with children under 5 years will then be given some general training to increase their confidence and help them to use their skills effectively. Some of the therapists will then be given some more specialist training in the Lidcombe Programme, which is widely recognised as one of the most effective ways to treat young dysfluent children.

The project worker is Margaret Evesham - me@stammering.org.

Previous pre-school projects: Parental Awareness Campaign completed 2002, and Primary Healthcare Workers Project completed 1999.

Last updated: January 2007