Government of Jersey

Children needing speech and language support (FOI)

Produced by the Freedom of Information office
Authored by Government of Jersey and published on 12 December 2022.
Prepared internally, no external costs.

Request

Children needing speech and language support:

For each quarter, from Q1 2018, please provide a table showing:

Child’s age (0-18)
Number of children in that age group to receive any form of speech and language support during the quarter

For the first day of each quarter, from Q1 2018, please also provide:

Average waiting time for an initial assessment for people aged 18 and under
Number of people aged 18 or under waiting for an initial assessment
Number of speech and language therapists employed

Response

The table below shows the count of unique individuals seen by the Children’s Speech and Language Therapy service in each quarter from January 2018 by age band. Each individual is counted once only per quarter. Age recorded is that at the time of the appointment.

The figures do not include clients aged 18 seen by the Adult Speech and Language service.

Where numbers are small, disclosure control has been applied to protect the privacy of individuals and numbers fewer than five are represented as ‘<5’. Article 25 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has been applied.

	Age Band
Quarter	0-4	5-8	9-12	13-18
2018 Q1	400	237	67	48
2018 Q2	385	232	49	9
2018 Q3	381	182	42	11
2018 Q4	368	187	50	22
2019 Q1	397	180	53	10
2019 Q2	374	184	38	11
2019 Q3	352	173	37	10
2019 Q4	386	190	41	8
2020 Q1	437	172	48	8
2020 Q2	261	93	30	<5
2020 Q3	238	98	21	<5
2020 Q4	263	143	31	6
2021 Q1	304	196	39	9
2021 Q2	260	171	37	8
2021 Q3	270	209	35	10
2021 Q4	282	182	36	9
2022 Q1	270	226	50	12
2022 Q2	270	216	43	8
2022 Q3	295	248	39	15
2022 Q4 (to date)	178	137	22	9

Data Source: Community Services electronic client record system

The table below shows the number of children on the waiting list for Speech and Language Therapy, along with the average waiting time for each quarter from January 2018. Please be advised that the quarterly figures are taken at the end of each quarter, so data for the final quarter of 2022 is not yet available.

Quarter	Number of children on waiting list	Average waiting time (Days)
2018 Q1	136	36
2018 Q2	110	31
2018 Q3	85	49
2018 Q4	130	40
2019 Q1	118	56
2019 Q2	72	64
2019 Q3	127	50
2019 Q4	108	62
2020 Q1	89	54
2020 Q2	19	47
2020 Q3	60	53
2020 Q4	119	54
2021 Q1	127	303
2021 Q2	85	258
2021 Q3	57	277
2021 Q4	94	230
2022 Q1	76	73
2022 Q2	61	60
2022 Q3	69	55

The table below shows the number of Paediatric Speech and Language Therapists (SALTs) employed each year from 2018 to present.

Year	Number of Paediatric SALTs
2018	6
2019	7
2020	9
2021	9
2022	15

Article Applied

Article 25 - Personal information

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005.

(2) Information is absolutely exempt information if –

(a) it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is not the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005; and

(b) its supply to a member of the public would contravene any of the data protection principles, as defined in that Law.

3) In determining for the purposes of this Article whether the lawfulness principle in Article 8(1)(a) of the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018 would be contravened by the disclosure of information, paragraph 5(1) of Schedule 2 to that Law (legitimate interests) is to be read as if sub-paragraph (b) (which disapplies the provision where the controller is a public authority) were omitted.