Last month, I took on a week of elective placement. Being elective, the hours I put in don’t count towards those that I need to do in order to complete the course and qualify as an SLT, but can invariably provide an opportunity to work and experience different clinical settings that perhaps wouldn’t come up during our regular/compulsory placements.

Yes, it means giving up your own time, sometimes in the midst of exam revision period, when it feels like there is a lot going on already. It also gives extra opportunity to gain experiences to talk about at interview (suddenly I realised that this time next year I’ll be applying for jobs…), so when an opportunity to be involved in an intensive stammering course for young people came up, there was no way I was letting that one slide.

Run by four speech and language therapists who were assisted by four students, the course ran for a week, with about 17 participants in all, who were divided into a primary school-ages group and a secondary-aged group.

Activities were focused on confidence building- mainly about speaking but also in social situations and de-sensitisation. This bit was about the young people choosing to put themselves in a situation that they might be worried about because they may be predicting they might stammer, and giving it a go. We’d then talk about the situation and see whether there was any evidence for how it went well. Many of these challenges involved the client talking to a stranger, requesting something or talking to someone unfamiliar. In other sessions, several participants said they’d experienced negative feedback in these situations, which might include being interrupted, being told to hurry up or simply being ignored, which can then feed into feeling fearful of trying these same things out at another time.

We spent some time talking about what stammering is, how it can manifest and how it feels to stammer. It was this stuff that was really useful for me as a training SLT, and I will never forget the analogy one of them used: ‘It’s like there are two people trying to get to the same guy’s house, but one of them (the fluent speaker) lives closer and has a car. The other person has to take a back route, and they might get robbed on the way. They need more time, but can get there in the end.’

There were loads of games. There was goal setting. There were opportunities to listen to other people talk about their experiences, talk about significant parts of life that were not to do with stammering, and there was a rubber chicken that accidently became everyone’s favourite game aid. At the end of the week, every single young person stood up in front of a room of friends and family and read something, presented something or talked about something that happened during the week.

There were lots of hard bits. At the end of the week, we sat down with the young person and their parent/carer, who might then ask ‘Did you teach them to not stammer’, or ‘How much longer will they be stammering?’. The answer was no, we did not, and they will possibly stammer for the rest of their lives. It was possible that some of the work around confidence and not minding that they might sometimes stammer helped them to be more fluent. It is also known that stammering can be like a wave- it comes and goes, gets bigger and smaller.

Working with families and other people around the client is such a big part of working with this clinical group; helping them to understand that communication is so much about a supportive environment, being confident and feeling like you’re able to initiate a conversation and your message be listened to, rather than focusing on how quickly your words come out.