Teachers
Welcome to the BEST training section of this website, where you will find all the information and documents needed to continue using BEST in your school.
What is BEST?
Building Early Sentences Therapy (BEST) is a new language intervention that has been designed to support children with language difficulties. The therapy helps children to use and understand 2, 3, and 4 clause-element sentences by highlighting the underlying structure of sentences, and therefore improving their ability to use abstractions when producing new sentences. The programme consists of 16 play-based sessions. It is recommended that sessions be delivered at regular intervals, with once or twice weekly being the most common pattern of delivery. There are built-in decision points to evaluate the child’s progress. Children leave the BEST programme when they have achieved the aims, or when they complete the intervention.
Research
10-15% of children experience language difficulties in the pre-school years. If difficulties persist into the school years, there are significant consequences for the child's long-term health and wellbeing. The provision of early intervention would therefore seem a priority, however there are few robustly evaluated language interventions.
This study has evaluated BEST to see whether it is effective when compared to other interventions that are currently being delivered in schools. Participating schools took part, either delivering the therapy or as a ‘treatment as usual’ control group. The dosage necessary to reach mastery on content and morphology was also explored.
Schools were split up into three groups; BEST + Signing, BEST only and treatment as usual (TAU).
The analysis is ongoing but preliminary results suggest that children who received the intervention made progress compared to TAU. The final report will be posted on this site when it is complete.
Who is BEST for?
BEST has been designed to help children 3-6 years olds who have language difficulties in English as their home language, and who do not have a diagnosed intellectual disability. The B-BEST for children with languages other than English is currently being trialed, and results will be released in due course. Language difficulties may present as:
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Expressive language difficulties
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Receptive language difficulties
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Mixed receptive-expressive language difficulties
Key Messages
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You do not need to encourage the child to participate or produce sentences if they do not want to. The most important thing is that they hear the input being provided, so don’t worry if they aren’t keen to join in just yet.
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Although it may seem unnatural at first, you do not need to praise the child while the therapy session is taking place. They will be rewarded by taking part, describing the sentences and having the opportunity to interact with the toys. It is the aim that they are exposed to the language input without disruption where possible, so try to keep other talking to a minimum while the session is taking place. If you need to reengage the child and draw them back to the task then it is fine to do so, especially by using their name.
How to use these webpages
This training package has been created to share BEST with you and your school. You will find all of the information you need to carry out BEST. If you would like to deliver BEST in your school, please contact the team atbesttraining@ncl.ac.ukto arrange delivery of the resources.
Some fantastic resources from ICAN Charity: