Targeted and Specialist Support
The BCRP studies include a descriptive review of the interventions commonly used in practice to support SLCN at a targeted and specialist level43. The review surveyed 500 speech and language therapists and collected information about 158 commonly used interventions and their perceived benefits.
Key findings of this paper include a lack of consistency regarding how interventions were described and classified. It made recommendations for the need to build the evaluation culture into everyday practice in order to build a more robust empirical evidence base for commonly used and positively reviewed interventions which may simply not have been subject to high level evaluation.
The findings from this study prompted the work that subsequently became the ‘What Works’ database. The development of ‘What Works’ is described in the technical report BCRP 1044 and accompanying technical annex. What Works45 is live project that continues to evaluate and add new interventions as they are submitted for review.