Communicating with others in a social context is called 'communicative participation'. Children who have speech and language difficulties may have restricted communicative participation and communicate with a small range of people in a small range of situations. School staff and speech and language therapists aim to help children to communicate more easily and expand their communicative participation. However, there are few assessments that measure such improvements. 

In this project we talked to children, parents, education staff and speech and language therapists to find out about children's communicative participation. We asked about the situations in which they communicate, who they communicate with and what they communicate for. We talked to groups of primary and secondary aged children, parents, teachers, teaching assistants and speech and language therapists to find out about communicative participation at different ages.

From these interviews we developed a definition of communicative participation for children and young people and a list of important features of communicative participation at different stages of childhood. We will now use the information to develop research applications to develop and test measures of communicative participation and interventions to improve it.