The third and final stop on my Churchill Fellowship coincided with the beginning of the Easter holidays for Australian schools, so my visit to Camberwell Girls Grammar School had that distinct 'end-of-term' buzz. I had come to meet with Dr Charlotte Forwood, the school's Director of Learning Design and Development and a dual-qualified teacher/speech and language pathologist. Charlotte's knowledge and enthusiasm for a seemingly boundless number of areas are infectious. Rather than attempt to summarise our wide-ranging conversation, I have attempted to create a visual representation, in honour of her relentless creativity and her famous conference sketchpads:
After a break for the Easter weekend (thankfully my toddler hasn't yet realised what Easter
eggs are made of), I was back into the city to meet with the Speech Pathology team at the Melbourne Archdiocese of Catholic Schools (MACS). The Catholic education system represents a substantial portion of schools, so it was valuable to see how SLPs are working within this sector. Over several hours and a large quantity of chocolate, we spoke (among other things) about the service's journey with establishing diagnosis and support for DLD, their strategic plan for improving student voice, how to write useful clinical reports and the importance of working with teachers.
The University of Melbourne is home to several exciting projects to promote oral language in early years settings and classrooms. I met with Associate Professor Jon Quach, who is leading a large scale intervention to improve oral language and reading outcomes in schools, and Dr Penny Levickis, who has just published a study analysing educator-child interactions in childcare settings. To my surprise, I found a familiar face in Penny's office: Professor Cristina McKean from Newcastle University, who kindly joined our meeting- an unexpected bonus! Both Jon and Penny spoke about the importance of tailoring professional learning for educators, whether that means supporting schools to reflect on their own strengths and choose their own development goals, or using video to help a practitioner consider what that individual child's needs are. They each consider their work with settings as a collaborative partnership, rather than an expert consultation model; a recurrent theme in my visit.
Professor Pamela Snow was one of the people I was most excited to meet with during my Fellowship. To anyone interested in evidence-based practice in speech and language therapy, or the language needs of young people in the youth justice system, or the language-to-literacy transition, or the so-called 'reading wars' in Australia, she needs no introduction. A dual-qualified speech and language pathologist and psychologist, she is the co-founder of the SOLAR Lab at La Trobe University and the author of the highly-enjoyable blog The Snow Report. Over Zoom, she was kind enough to tell me her thoughts on how to move forward on supporting children with DLD (teacher pre-service education, opportunities for dual SLP-teacher qualification, better referral and service provision pathways, better teacher adaptations as well as an SLP service for referrals), SLPs' role in literacy and Tier 1/universal approaches, and whether specialist language schools should exist alongside a model of inclusion.
On the final day before the journey home, I visited the spiritual home of Aussie speeches: Speech Pathology Australia (SPA). Jane Delaney (Senior Adviser Early Childhood and Education), Amy Fitzpatrick (Senior Adviser for Disability) and Erin West (Senior Policy Officer) cheerfully responded to the many questions that I had accumulated during my visit, and we talked extensively about how SPA supports SLPs working in education, the evolving workforce and accompanying challenges, the impact of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), neurodiversity-affirming practice in relation to DLD and how to embed cultural awareness. I left, as I have from every single meeting during this Fellowship, with a notepad full of scribbles and a mind buzzing with ideas, and headed to the airport.
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