Can nursery key-workers determine which 30-month-olds have comprehension delays? A comparison of three screening tools

UK nurseries are required to carry out a progress check with two-year-olds in a number of areas of development, including language. Nurseries may use any format (Blades et al., 2014). Many use a format based on the guidance produced by DfE’s Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) ‘my unique child’ whereby each of the child’s developmental domains is assigned to an age band (e.g. 22-36 months). Since significant delays in the receptive language of two-year-olds are more predictive of later language and other developmental difficulties than are delays in expressive language (Chiat & Roy, 2008, 2013; Beitchman et al., 1996), we compared this current keyworker method of assessment with two other tools in relation to a direct standardized assessment of receptive language.

Seventy monolingual 30-35-month-olds were included. The direct measure was the auditory component of the Preschool Language Scale (PLS), which has been found to have high predictive validity (Chiat & Roy, 2008). The same children were assessed by their keyworkers on three language screening measures: the Language Use Inventory (LUI), the WellComm and the EYFS ‘my unique child’ language and communication sections. Nursery workers also rated children’s attentional difficulties. The Wellcomm had acceptable levels of sensitivity and specificity but only when we adapted the manual guidelines. Both the EYFS and LUI had poor sensitivity. The Wellcomm was the only measure which had concurrent validity (p< .001) when child age, attentional difficulties and keyworker qualifications and experience were factored out, accounting for a significant amount of variance (37.21%).

The method which most UK nursery keyworkers use to assess the language of two-year-olds does not pick up those who score poorly on direct standardised measures of language comprehension. In fact, the EYFS measure of language comprehension had the poorest relationship of all measures to the auditory component of the PLS. The same keyworkers are much better able to pick out those 2½-year-olds with comprehension delays using the WellComm tool.