Since starting in my career over 10 years ago as an NHS Speech and Language Therapist, I have spent time working in both Adults and Children’s services. One of the areas I have found most challenging is providing effective support to autistic children.

The drive to improve my practice led to extensive research and discovering neuro-divergent affirming practice and Gestalt Language Processing which finally provided the breakthrough I had been looking for. Sharing this has become one of my greatest passions, because I can see how these changes in approach result in such big differences in a person’s ability to communicate more effectively whilst also honouring who they are as a person.

Previously traditional Speech Language Therapy approaches meant comparing autistic children’s skills to neurotypical developmental patterns and norms rather than building on the unique skills that children already had.

So many autistic children that I have worked with were stuck repeating the same phrases over and over again but I did not know how to help them effectively. Re-directing or ignoring echolalia formed a part of not working in a neurodivergent affirming way but I know better and do better now.

I started Communicaid in order to help more people, to share what I know and to offer a specialist service where this is my main focus. Concentrating on areas of speech and language therapy that I feel very passionate about allows me to offer an excellent service to my clients and their families which is so important to me.