How our therapy works

The organisations we work with use the Balanced System. This helps children who need support at different levels: universal, targeted, and specialist.

Universal support

Universal support is the help that everybody gets. This could be general advice and support to help children develop their communication, or their functional and/or physical skills.

Targeted support

Targeted support is for children who may need extra help with their speech, language and communication (for speech and language therapy), or with their functional and/or physical skills (for occupational therapy or physiotherapy). This could be small group work in early years settings or school, or activities you can do at home.

Sometimes Therapists will be directly involved, but often they will provide training and support to others who work with children in the early years setting or school.

Specialist support

Specialist support is for children who need more specific support from a Therapist. This could include a more detailed assessment and individualised support to help the child achieve a specific goal.

The Balanced System framework

The Balanced System framework aims to make sure that a child is supported as well as possible within their everyday environment. To do this, the framework asks us to think about:

  • family support: making sure the child has the right support at home for their needs

  • environment: making sure nurseries, schools and homes are set up to help with communication, physical and functional needs

  • workforce development: making sure that anyone working with the child has the skills to help them with communication, physical and functional needs

  • identification: making sure there are easy and reliable ways of finding out who needs help

  • intervention: using activities and strategies we know help with communication, physical and functional needs

You can find out more about the Balanced System and speech and language therapy across Greater Manchester on: