According to researchers, it is best for children with language disorders that there are both speech therapists and educators who can collaborate in the schools around these children.

Ljungby is one of many municipalities that in a survey from SVT Nyheter answered that they do not have any speech therapists employed who work towards the school.

According to Birgitta Bergsten, who is head of the central student health in Ljungby municipality, however, they have other professional groups that provide the support that they as a municipality are obliged to offer.

Difficult for those who have not been diagnosed early

Birgitta Bergsten thinks that it is a bigger problem that Region Kronoberg has for several years completely stopped giving treatment and diagnosing children who only suffer from language disorders, after the children have turned six years old.

- If you have not been diagnosed with a language disorder before you start school by the region, it is difficult to get a diagnosis after that because there is no speech therapist who sets it.

The region has speech therapists of preschool age, zero to six years, and there our special educators collaborate with those speech therapists.

We wish there was the same collaboration for our school children, says Birgitta Bergsten to SVT Nyheter Småland.

Agreements on wrong roads

Birgitta Bergsten, together with the other heads of student health in Kronoberg County, has tried to get the Kronoberg Region to start investigating and treating children with language disorders again.

None of the salaried employees can currently explain why Region Kronoberg has had this routine.

Several sources tell SVT that an agreement on tax exchange was written many years ago.

According to that agreement, the municipalities must have been paid to take a larger share of the responsibility for children with language disorders.

But no one can pick out the agreement and what actually applies is thus unclear.

"We can get a little rigid sometimes"

However, the picture of the municipalities is quite clear;

over the years, several children have become completely without speech therapy support for their language disorder.

- I think that these children are a little discriminated against by the region, says Birgitta Bergsten.

Now a change can be underway, in the form of a new collaboration agreement between the municipalities and the region.

- This is about the fact that we can get a little rigid sometimes around where our responsibility begins and ends.

And here we have something to learn and get better, says Roger O Nilsson who is director of health and medical care in the Kronoberg Region.

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3 quick facts about language disorders in the video above.

Photo: Storyblocks