Speech pathology support for home schooled students. What is it? Who needs it? What can it look like in the real world? Where are we heading?

We work with lots of families who educate their children at home. Some live in Sydney. But most live in rural or remote areas.

Home schooling is becoming more common

Home education – also known as home schooling – is a legal option in all states and territories of Australia. For example, in New South Wales, home education is regulated by the Education Act (1990), which (among other things) requires home educated students to be registered with the NSW Department of Education.

In Australia, about 45,000 students are educated at home. In NSW, there are more than 12,000 home schooled students.

Why do some families home school their children?

Families home school their children for lots of reasons, including religious, philosophical and moral beliefs, remoteness, concerns about school systems, financial stress, bullying, and physical and mental health issues.

Home education vs. school: is it one or the other?

Not necessarily.

Some students attend mainstream schools for a while before switching to home schooling. Others are home educated for a period of time, and then transition to school.

Why do some families of home educated children seek out speech pathologists?

Around a third of Australian home schooled children have a developmental difference. Most home schooled students I work with have at least one developmental difference, including specific learning disabilities (e.g. dyslexia or dysgraphia), autism, ADHD, and language disorders (e.g. Developmental Language Disorder).

Some parents and carers we work with report that a mainstream setting does not meet their child’s social or emotional needs. Over 1 in 5 home schooled students have at least one diagnosed mental health condition that influenced their parents’ decision to home school, which includes more than a third of home schooled students who have previously been in a mainstream education system.

What can speech pathology for home schooled children look like? (A case study)

We deliver most of our speech pathology support for home schooled clients by telehealth. This helps us to reach families in rural and remote areas, as well as to support clients who prefer to work online for any reason, e.g. because of anxiety or logistical challenges.

For privacy reasons (obviously!), we can’t talk about anything specific to a particular client or family we work with. But, to show how we approach therapy planning and delivery, I thought it would be helpful to provide a mini-case study.

Here is a real situation, quoted in the 2022 study by Slater and colleagues (cited below):

“My son has inferential comprehension and social skill delays due to his Autism. He has a slower processing speed…and he has high anxiety. Three public schools all fell back to policy rather than provide fairly low level supports, and I realised if my son was to grow and develop we’d need to advocate and do it ourselves. Homeschooling is not a permanent plan for us, rather a stop gap while we address educational needs.”

So what, specifically, would we do to help this young man and his family?

Before doing anything, I would:

talk at length to the family – including the student – to understand their concerns as well as the student’s strengths, interests, preferred activities, functional communication skills and goals (including longer-term goals);
avoid assumptions, and make sure I understood and respected the family’s reasons for home schooling, as well as the family’s beliefs, values, approach, preferences, and priorities.

Assuming everyone’s immediate concern was about the student’s inferential comprehension skills, we would work with the family and client to target the goal with evidence-based therapy that integrates my clinical expertise (education, clinical experience and skills); with their values and preferences (including personal preferences, concerns and expectations); and the best research evidence available.

What does this mean in practice?

We would provide the family and client with a plain English, evidence-based explanation of their specific goal and why it matters in the real world.

We would encourage the family to get mental health support to help their son manage his anxiety. We would work with that professional and the family to coordinate and prioritise goals.

We would get to work, partnering with the family to deliver therapy proven to increase students’ inferencing skills:

We know that students with language difficulties (including some students with autism) have particular challenges with elaborative inferencing (Gough Kenyon et al., 2018).

Elaborative inferencing – or gap-filling – is where you figure out what you are reading about by using your own background knowledge of the world and your own experiences to fill in gaps in the information provided in the text. For example:

During the 20th century, fishing boats became hugely more efficient so that it was possible to catch large quantities of fish in a short time. Towards the end of the century it became necessary to regulate fishing, for example by setting limits (quotas) on the catches of each fisherman or boat.

Question: Why did it become necessary to regulate fishing?

I would recall that Elbro & Buch-Inversen published a terrific study back in 2013 (cited below) showing that you can teach children to use their background knowledge to improve their inferential comprehension in eight, 30-minute sessions using graphic models and short factual texts to prompt students to activate their background knowledge, e.g.:

Source: Elbro & Buch-Iversen, 2013

I would then work though additional examples (this one is taken from the same study):

Most people have once heard grasshoppers sing in the summer. The grasshoppers’ song is very high pitched. Therefore you need a good sense of hearing in order to hear the song. Actually, it is not correct to say that grasshoppers sing because they do not use their voice to sing. The grasshopper makes the song, or the sound, by rubbing its legs against a sharp edge on the wings. It is not easy to spot a grasshopper as its body is almost invisible when it is surrounded by plants. It blends in with the surroundings. If you want to find a grasshopper, you ought to follow the sound. Remember to listen to the grasshopper while you are young, because you might not hear the grasshopper when you get older.

Question: Why might you not hear the grasshopper when you get older?

Write your answer in the empty box.

With a bit of planning, we would apply this approach to texts that were meaningful to the client and consistent with the NSW curriculum and family’s values, including texts relevant to the client’s interests and longer-term plans.

As we get to know each other, we might modify the training, e.g., to include explicit teaching of vocabulary or sentence syntax, or decoding, or reading fluency, or writing skills, depending on the client’s functional communication strengths and challenges.

In parallel, we would also encourage the family to help their son learn as much about the world around him as possible, including through reading or listening to quality texts and by giving the family ideas to help him directly experience it with family and friends, and local communities, even with his anxiety. We would use texts that include useful world knowledge as well as useful examples of social thinking and reasoning.

If the family decided to work toward restarting school, we would work with the family, educators and other professionals to plan and support the client’s transition.

Where are we heading with speech pathology for home schooled students, and why are some families worried right now?

The Federal Government is working with the states to divert lots of children with autism and developmental delay from the NDIS.

For children younger than 9, the plan is to support some of these children with a new system called Thriving Kids. Some therapies (including speech pathology services) will be delivered by state governments. But Thriving Kids supports are intended to be delivered in mainstream settings, like schools.

We don’t know what public speech pathology services will be available for children aged 9 years or above who are diverted from the NDIS. We understand there will be another system called Foundational Supports, but the government has yet to release any details. Depending on a student’s needs, limited Medicare rebates may be available in some cases.

In short, no one knows what publicly-funded speech pathology services will be available to home schooled students with autism or developmental delay who lose access to NDIS funding. Some commentators and advocates are concerned that the NDIS changes may result in a postcode lottery, favouring families who live in cities and higher socioeconomic areas, and families who can afford to pay for speech pathology and other therapies privately.

Whatever happens, we speech pathologists have a professional obligation to advocate for accessible health, education and disability services for home schooled students who need them.

Principal sources:

Slater, E. V., Burton, K., & McKillop, D. (2022). Reasons for home educating in Australia: who and why? Educational Review, 74(2), 263–280. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2020.1728232

Elbro, C., & Buch-Iversen, I. (2013). Activation of Background Knowledge for Inference Making: Effects on Reading Comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 17(6), 435–452. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.774005

Gough Kenyon, S.M., Palikara, O. & Lucas, R.M. (2018). Explaining Reading Comprehension in Children With Developmental Language Disorder: The Importance of Elaborative Inferencing, Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 61, 2517-2531.