Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his Department has made on reducing waiting times for children requiring speech and language therapy.

Community health services, including children’s speech and language therapy, are locally commissioned to enable systems to best meet the needs of their communities.

For 2026/27 we have asked systems to actively manage long waits for community health services, including reducing the proportion of waits over 18 weeks, developing a plan to eliminate all 52-week waits, and increasing community health services capacity to meet growth in demand, expected to be approximately 3% nationally per year.

NHS England is working with the Department for Education to identify and support children with speech, language, and communication needs by co-funding pathfinder sites to deliver the Early Language Support for Every Child programme.

The programme aims to identify and support children and young people in early years and primary school settings with mild to moderate speech, language, and communication needs, reducing the rate of specialist referrals, and increasing workforce capacity through innovative workforce models.