Assessing young people in Youth Justice; the development and trialing of an oral communication assessment tool for the use of those working with young people in Youth Justice contexts

Abstract

The focus on communication needs among young people in contact with the law is of relatively recent date (see Anderson, Hawes & Snow, 2016, for a review). The extent of the problem, usually indicated at around 60% of that population, and the fact that almost none of the young people studied to date have ever been In contact with speech-language therapy, shows us that it Is unlikely that direct Intervention from a speclalist will be possible for all. Meanwhile, police, soclal workers, health workers, educators, ,lawyers and judges will be interacting with these young people and attempting to manage their communlcation needs with varying degrees of awareness and success. The situatlon prompted a research project at the University of Auckland to develop an oral language assessment tool which could be used by those workers who are not SLTs. It is not a screener, but a criterion-referenced tool designed with the particular oral language comprehension and expression difficulties that have been reported in this context; for example the language of time, explanatory texts, and the vocabulary of the law. This presentation will outline the development of the tool and the trialling of it in youth justice contexts in New Zealand. Results include a comparison of the performance of a group of young people on this tool to that of their performance on a standardised language test, the CELF-4.