August 2026
What is your current role?
I'm a children’s community speech and language therapist, currently working in the schools team at Evelina London. My role mainly involves supporting children and young people in schools across Lambeth and Southwark. I work with children, their families and school staff to support their speech, language and communication needs.
Alongside my school-based work, I also spend some of my time on our service's assessment pathway for home-educated children. This involves carrying out assessments with children who receive home schooling to understand their communication strengths and needs and providing recommendations to support them.
Another part of my role involves creating videos for the Evelina London Speech and Language Therapy Facebook page. Through these, we share practical strategies, activity ideas and information on a range of communication topics to support parents and educators.
Tell us about a typical day
A typical day for me involves visiting a school in Lambeth or Southwark and spending the day working with children and school staff. I usually stay in the same school from around 9am until 2.30pm. After this, I often return to one of our community bases to complete admin and prepare for upcoming visits. This is also a nice chance to see my other speech and language therapy colleagues!
My day can be very varied and might include:
- carrying out assessments to understand a child's speech, language and communication strengths and needs
- training school staff to deliver therapy programmes and strategies that help children achieve their communication goals
- supporting children directly in speech and language therapy sessions
- providing training for teaching staff to support a whole-school approach to speech, language and communication
- attending meetings with school staff and other professionals to plan and review support for individual children
- meeting with parents and school staff to discuss a child's progress, celebrate achievements and discuss any ongoing support
- planning therapy and setting goals by combining knowledge of a child's strengths and needs with the priorities of the child, their family and school
What's the best thing about your job?
I particularly enjoy supporting secondary-aged children. As children get older, helping them develop self-advocacy becomes an increasingly important part of my role. In secondary schools, I enjoy helping young people to understand their own communication strengths and needs and become more confident in advocating for themselves. This often involves supporting them to understand their identity in relation to neurodivergence (such as autism, ADHD, and developmental language disorder) which is an area I'm passionate about.
What is your proudest moment?
I don’t think I have one single proudest moment. Instead, it is the small moments of gratitude or progress that tend to make me feel proudest. Doing this job has taught me a lot about the importance of noticing and celebrating the small, but meaningful moments of impact I see in my day-to-day role.
What are you working on at the moment?
I'm writing this blog during the school summer holidays, which is always a great opportunity for our team to catch up on service development projects and think about how we can continue to improve the support we offer.
This summer, I'm working on a project linked to the government's Experts at Hand initiative as part of the new special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) reforms. My team and I are exploring how this approach might look locally and how we can continue to make our specialist knowledge widely accessible to support children, young people and schools.
What would you say to someone thinking of becoming a speech and language therapist at Evelina London?
I would say that the children's community speech and language therapy team at Evelina London is a lovely one to work in. The people within the team are integral to this. We're a large team, which means there is a huge amount of knowledge and experience to learn from. But what I value most is the friendly and welcoming culture and a real sense that you can be yourself. I think both things mean that you quickly build genuine friendships and continue to feel supported and celebrated by your colleagues.
Thank you to the children and young people who have so brilliantly illustrated our blog pages.