Speech Pathologist near Bexley North Station

Bexley North has plenty of school-age children: at the 2021 Census, 501 of its 4,281 residents were aged 5 to 14. Bexley North Public School is about 700 m from the station, with Clemton Park Public School and Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Primary School about a kilometre away.

The work I do most with this age group:

• Speech sounds. A child who is still hard to understand at school age often has a sound pattern they have not grown out of, and the right target makes the difference.
• Stuttering. Getting stuck on sounds or words, repeating or stretching them. See stuttering therapy.
• Language. Understanding instructions, finding the right words and putting sentences together, including developmental language disorder (DLD, a long-term difficulty learning language). See language therapy.
• Reading and spelling. Literacy builds on spoken language, so the two are worked on together.

Stuttering. For older children and teenagers I use the Camperdown Program, an Australian-developed approach that teaches a speech pattern and then practises it in harder and harder situations, from home to class presentations. I also work on avoidance: many children start avoiding words or situations they expect to stutter on, and that can limit them more than the stutter itself. For younger brothers or sisters who have just started stuttering, the Lidcombe Program is the parent-delivered approach I use with preschoolers.

Speech sounds. The first job is finding out why a child is hard to understand. It might be a sound pattern they have not grown out of, inconsistent articulation, or childhood apraxia of speech (difficulty planning the movements for speech). Each needs different therapy, so getting the answer right matters.

Language. Developmental language disorder affects around one in fourteen school-age children, and it is often not picked up until Year 1 or 2, when classroom demands rise. Therapy covers vocabulary, sentence structure, following multi-step instructions and telling stories.

ADHD. For children with ADHD I work on conversation, organising a story and processing spoken language. Medication helps attention, but it doesn't teach a child how to structure what they want to say in a class presentation.