How Social Determinants of Health Shape Parental Concern and Teacher Recognition of Student Speech-Language Needs

Despite the importance of receiving speech-language therapy for educational outcomes, the role of language in all subject learning, and parental language complexity as a hypothesized mechanism for reproducing educational inequalities, there is a surprising lack of attention to speech-language issues within sociology. The authors link theories from sociology of education and medical sociology and use the prospective longitudinal nationally representative UK Millennium Cohort Study to examine the roles that social determinants of health, teacher bias, and parental concern play in teacher recognition of speech-language needs in early childhood, net of a measure of speech-language ability. Although social determinants affect ability, there is little evidence of bias in teacher recognition once controlling for said ability, with the exception of lower recognition of female speech-language needs. However, social determinants also drive whether parents are concerned about their children's speech-language ability, which has a striking association with teacher recognition for both under- and overperforming children.