Speech and Language Therapy

Welcome to the longest running UK website for Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs).

On this site you will find links, resources and audio and video files related to speech and language therapy.

Please explore using the Menu (top right).

This is a web site run by Dr Sean Pert, Consultant Speech and Language Therapist and Senior Clinical Lecturer in Speech and Language Therapy. The site has been a hobby for many decades.

Search www.speechtherapy.co.uk: Add your search term and press Enter…

I have maintained a website on speech and language therapy matters since the beginnings of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. In 1994-1995 just prior to qualifying, the first iterations of this site appeared on U-NET. The domain name www.speechtherapy.co.uk was registered on the 12th February 1998. At that time, the web was in its infancy and websites were just beginning to appear. Web pages had to be written in HTML and so were a labour of love. Mike Ryan, Andrew Russell, Gerrard Woods and Sean Maloney all helped with the early hosting and technical support.

This site appeared prior to official sites such as the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT).

My undergraduate dissertation was one of the first to include a web reference! At graduation I was awarded a book on web authoring (Heslop & Budnick, 1995) as part of the Speech Therapy Prize for being one of the best students. This book helped me to craft an early site, collecting together the links then available.

I also published the now hilariously titled 'The haves and the have-nets: A Review of the Internet' for the RCSLT Bulletin magazine in December 1995. Little did I know, that some 27 years later I would become Chair of the RCSLT during our online Annual General Meeting. How far the web has come during the course of my career.

Why not check out our site over the years?

Click the original website logo to see past iterations of this site:

Dr Carol Stow and I worked together clinically and supported each other during our PhD studies, which led to collaborations on the clinical specialist areas of Speech and Language Disorders in a Bilingual Context, Speech Sound Disorder (SSD), and Developmental Language Disorder. We both have a strong commitment to diversity and this is reflected in our clinical specialist interests and research publications.

We have been fortunate enough to work with many talented and insightful colleagues, including Professor Barbara Dodd, Professor Cristina McKean, Professor Pamela Enderby and Sandra J. Robertson, Past Chair of RCSLT.

Past iterations of the website included information about Dr Carol Stow FRCSLT, retired Consultant Speech and Language Therapist in Bilingualism. Carol was a pioneer in developing a ground breaking Speech and Language Therapy team ('The Bilingual Service') in Rochdale, North West Manchester, UK dedicated to working with children whose families spoke languages other than English (LOTE). This team consisted of specialist speech and language therapists, bilingual assistants and professional interpreters. The service worked with refugees and asylum seekers as well as members of more established local minority ethnic communities and delivered assessment and intervention in mother tongue: delivering services in at least twelve different languages at any given time. Children whose therapy was to be delivered in English were transferred to ‘The Monolingual Service’. Children and young people with a wide range of speech and language disorders benefitted from this approach, which ensured that children did not lose their home language skills through language attrition.

Many of our publications discuss the development of the service, assessments and how home language enabled families to retain their home language and cultural identity. You may explore this body of work, and how it influenced clinical guidelines in the UK in the list of publications, below.
Note that many are collaborations and may be duplicated across these pages!

Any information about Speech and Language Therapy itself, including referral, assessment, and intervention/treatment should be directed to the relevant officer at the Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists (RCSLT), or you should make contact with your local Speech and Language Therapy Department.

Please visit The Association of Speech and Language Therapists in Independent Practice (ASLTIP) website.

Heslop, B. And Budnick, L. (1995). HTML Publishing on the Internet for Windows: Create Great-Looking Documents Online: Home Pages, Newsletter, Catalogs, Ads & Forums, First Edition. Chapel Hill, NC: Ventana Press, Inc.