The prison service
Undiagnosed speech and language disorders
In the prison population there are multiple problems with respect to speech, language and literacy, all of these bearing on offending and re-offending. Juliette Gregory and Karen Bryan (2011) looked at the extent to which young offenders tended to have previously undiagnosed issues with language. They found that a program of therapy was effective in improviing scores on standardised tests. Maxine Winstanley and colleagues (2020) compared the significance of diagnosed Developmental Language Disrorder DLD with other indices including deprivation. They found that DLD was the most significant single variable. One of the DLD characters which they identified was poor story telling. This is highly treatable, especially in the context of a Lada Aidarova-style program of work of language investigation.
A highly flexible program, driven entirely by the needs of participants, is of great value.