Lucy Rodgers (project lead)
Lucy is a Speech and Language Therapist under-taking this work as a part of her PhD fellowship, funded by the Wellcome Trust. Lucy has been researching this area for the past 5 years. During this time she has engaged with clinicians and parents of children who have accessed speech and language therapy to establish what the project aims are today. She published a scoping review on this topic as part of her pre-doctoral work in 2022: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1460-6984.12719
Lucy is passionate about speech and language therapy having everyday, meaningful impacts for children and families. She is also passionate about including a diverse range of voices throughout the intervention development process. This is essential to ensuring that the intervention can be relevant-and a positive experience– to families from varied backgrounds.
Prof. Ros Herman, Prof. Nikki Botting and Dr Marin Cartwright (supervisory team)
The supervisory team bring a wealth of experience to this intervention development process. Their expertise spans intervention development/evaluation, quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods approaches as well as content specific expertise in the fields of SSD and DLD. Further information can be found in their staff profiles, below.
Expert Steering Group
Dave
Dave is a parent to a child with SSD/DLD. He has lived experience of navigating the NHS speech and language therapy system, and supporting his son to develop his communication skills. He advocates tirelessly for the power of speech and language therapy, and for there to be more equity between different NHS services. He has given lectures at Birmingham City University and has done advocacy work on behalf of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT). Dave is passionate about enabling families to access speech and language therapy and promoting awareness of the power of early speech and language therapy intervention.
Emma
Emma is a specialist speech and language therapist (SLT) who has also conducted her own study into parents’ experiences of having a child with DLD and the support they receive. She works within a specialist provision for young children with DLD and SSD and also within mainstream schools in Sheffield. Emma is passionate about giving a voice to children and young people with DLD, empowering families and supporting self-advocacy.
Laura
Laura is a specialist educational needs teacher for the early years. She used to teach in a specialist ICAN provision and now provides outreach support in Brighton and Hove within the multi-disciplinary early language support team (ELST). Laura is passionate about promoting a range of inclusive communication strategies which children can access to extend their social interactions, play, learning and feelings of success. Laura often supports children whose behaviour can be interpreted by staff as ‘challenging’ . She works closely with nursery settings to promote a shared understanding and awareness of the child’s speech and language difficulties and offers advice and recommendations about how the learning environment and adult-approaches can be adapted to positively support these children.
Meriem
Meriem is a specialist paediatric speech and language therapist. Meriem works part-time in mainstream London primary schools supporting children with a range of speech and language needs. In addition to this, Meriem is part of a specialist speech sound clinic supporting children with speech sound difficulties. In both roles this involves working closely and jointly with parents, teachers and school staff to ensure success and functional impact for the children she supports. Meriem also works part time at City University, London as a lecturer in Speech and Language Therapy. Meriem is passionate about inclusion, equality and diversity within the profession. She is a cofounder of SLTeaTime, a podcast that shines a light on EDI in relation to speech and language therapy and works closely with the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapy to ensure positive change for all service users particularly those from the global majority.
Natalie
Natalie is a SLT lead for the early language support team in Brighton and Hove. As part of her role, she provides outreach support for young children with DLD and/or SSD. She also provides differential diagnosis between autism and DLD within in the Brighton child development team. Natalie is passionate about neurodiversity, recognising a child’s individual needs and providing tailored support to their families.
Patrycja
Patrycja works Ethnic Minority Achievement Service (EMAS) in Brighton and Hove. She has extensive experience of working closely with the local SLT services to support children with DLD and/or SSD, where English is an additional language. She also has personal experience of raising children in a multi-lingual household. Patrycja is passionate about promoting inclusion of pupils with EAL and giving them the best start possible in British education system. She cares deeply about helping families with EAL to understand the system so they can support their children’s learning.
Sophie
Sophie is an adult with lived experience of DLD, and paediatric SLT services. She was first taken to speech and language therapy by her parents when she was 3. Sophie is an advocate for SLT and raises awareness of DLD through her facebook/twitter page and work with the charities NAPLIC and RADLD. She is the recipient of the RADLD outstanding achievement award 2022. Sophie is passionate about raising awareness and making sure that people learn about DLD.
