NHS speech and language therapy

Does anyone here from the UK have any experience with the NHS SLT services. We've had an initial assessment with a speech therapist last week and she's said my 2 year old can't be accepted on to SLT and has asked us to go for an autism referral. I know speech delays can sometimes be indicative of autism, I firmly believe that it is not always the case. Children can exhibit speech delays for a variety of reasons that do not necessarily point to autism. The wait list for autism referrals is 2-3 years, he's now been discharged from SLT so I'm not sure what my options are now unless we go private.

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We had to go private. Honestly NHS SLT is shocking and it's not the therapists it's lack of funding so they have to rule out other causes of speech delay first and asd is the most common cause. Our NHS SLT recommend we go down the ASD assessment route and my son was eventually diagnosed with ASD, he scored 13 on the ados assessment, the cut off point for diagnosis is 12 so it's likely it wouldn't have been picked up untill much later did he not have the speech delay that turned out to be CAS. The NHS SLT missed our son's CAS and it ended up being diagnosed privately.

@Naomi how much is per session for private SLT? Thank you very much

We pay £80 an hour to his regular SLT and £140 and hour to the specialist who we see every 4 months that does his cas therapy program

@Naomi thank you very much for all your help. How often will your child attend SLT?is it once a week or once in two weeks I want to bring my daughter as well

His SLT sees him weekly in school or at home in the holidays. At home they go up to his room to do the sessions. He's really happy with her and feels comfortable so I just leave them to it.

It is a long journey and slt is very expensive and having it once a week is not enough. I would recommend to ask slt to make goals and explain everything so you can work with child on daily basis. And ask slt just to check progress on monthly bases