Date published: 2007/05/10
The BBC says:
Toddlers are to get help learning how to talk in a bid to cut the numbers of children starting school with poor language skills for their age.
Half of children enter primary school unable to speak as well as they are expected to, research suggests.
The Early Talk programme which uses gestures, symbols and signing to expand vocabulary, is being piloted in 200 government-backed children's centres.
It will also be used to target youngsters with potential difficulties.
Clare Geldard, head of Early Years for the charity behind the programme, I CAN, said there were concerns that the number of pre-school children with speech and language difficulties was on the rise.
"We don't know why this is the case and I am sure there are a myriad of reasons.
...
I CAN's chief executive Virginia Beardshaw said one in 10 children across the UK were thought to have a communication disability.She added that the Early Talk programme, which will ultimately be rolled out to 3,000 Sure Start children's centres, would foster environments "where communication is embedded".
Being the BBC, they don't give any useful information, like how much this is going to cost per child, and whether it is value for money (compared with everything else that could be done with the money). Of course the BBC, as with the rest of the chattering class, doesn't care how much anything costs. Government should just throw money at everything the chattering class wants them to. And you have to wonder about the claim that "one in 10 children across the UK were thought to have a communication disability". If you draw a distribution of anything you are not going to get a perfect spike with everybody at that point, but instead a (near enough) normal (gaussian) distribution (or log normal if the data is inherently positive), and usually fairly broad (i.e. with a significant standard deviation). And then if you come up with some arbitrary definition of what a "satisfactory" performance is (and in many circumstances many people would take the mean) then anybody below that cutoff is obviously deemed not to be "satisfactory". So if some arbitrary definition gives that one in 10 children has "unsatisfactory" performance then that says as much about the arbitrary definition as it does about anything else.
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