Speech Pathology

Speech Pathologists at CliniKids focus on supporting children’s speech, language, communication, and social skills. Our Speech Pathologists will work closely with your child and family to set and achieve functional individualised goals.

A range of evidence-based intervention approaches are used by our Speech Pathologists. Therapy ranges from naturalistic and child-led through to semi-structured or highly structured formats depending on what will be most beneficial for your child and family.

Our experienced Speech Pathologists provide therapy across all domains, with specialist skills in:

Social communication and play
We support children to learn skills to build strong relationships with important people in their life. This includes sharing attention, play, taking turns, conversation, and other friendship skills.

Language skills
We support children to understand, acquire and use language to understand the world around them and clearly express their thoughts and ideas. Language skills include (but are not limited to) the use and understanding of words, sentence structure, grammar and storytelling skills. Language skills play an important role in participation in school environments.

Total Communication Approach and Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC)
Using a Total Communication Approach, we support children to use and develop a broad range of skills to communicate and engage with others. In addition to supporting verbal communication, our Speech Pathologists encourage the use of multi modal strategies such as use of pictures, gesture, and body language. We also use specialist knowledge to assess, prescribe and support children to use aided (e.g. speech generating devices or picture systems) and unaided forms of AAC (e.g. signing).

Speech sound skills
A child’s speech sound skills affect how clearly their speech is understood by those around them. Our Speech Pathologists work directly with your child to improve your child’s ability to produce and combine speech sounds so they can clearly communicate with others.

Mealtimes
Eating, drinking and mealtimes are an important part of your child’s daily routine and can be impacted by many factors. We work in a multidisciplinary family centred way to support your child to have more enjoyable, independent, and safe mealtimes.

Understanding an autism diagnosis 
Our Speech Pathologists can support you and your child to learn more about their autistic identity, neurodiversity and how to advocate for their communication preferences in everyday situations. 

If you think your child may benefit from Speech Pathology services, please contact our team.