Grace and Sally presented a poster at the Irish Association of Speech & Language Therapists (IASLT) Biennial Conference “Celebrating our Profession: A Changing World of SLT” on 8th and 9th September 2021. The Conference took place online this year and provided a wonderful opportunity to connect with colleagues and to showcase our work in Let’s Grow Together. The title of the poster presentation was “A Population Level Study of the Language Profiles of Irish Children in Junior Infants in a Low Socio-Economic Area” and it was authored by Grace Walsh, Sally O’Sullivan & Katherine Harford (Lets Grow Together! Infant and Childhood Partnerships CLG) Emma Hallahan, Dr. Margaret Curtin & Dr. Ciara O’Toole (UCC). The poster shared results of speech and language assessments carried out with children in Junior Infant between 2016-2019. The results suggest that Irish children living in a low socio-economic area are at an increased risk of experiencing language difficulties at school entry than those in higher socio-economic areas and support the need for prevention and promotion services embedded within communities to support speech, language, literacy and communication development as early as possible.
