August news

Our team has had a very busy run recently. At our workshop on Friday we hosted a fabulous group who brought so much experience and knowledge to share from their work in Alternative Education and Restorative Justice Conferencing. We also were delighted to work with the Youth Court Judges at their recent conference and to run the first of a series of workshops for CYF staff.Our speech-language therapists have recently contributed assessments and programme modification recommendations to MYND/Graeme Dingle Foundation’s Siblings’ Programme. We are also looking forward to participating in some research data collection in the next few weeks that will help to understand more about the language needs of those involved in youth justice in NZ.We are also managing a growing number of speech-language therapy assignments and court-appointed Communication Assistant roles. These have ranged from providing assessment and recommendations for children involved with care and protection and youth justice teams, to assisting with the communication involved in Family Group Conferences. The team of SLTs at Talking Trouble Aotearoa NZ is expanding to manage this growing interest in meeting the needs of vulnerable children and youth.I was lucky enough to tag a few days of work onto a trip to the UK to see family. The wonderful team at Salford Youth Offending Community team includes a speech and language therapist and I learnt a lot from how her work is embedded into the work of the rest of the team. I was also lucky enough to visit to Barton Moss Secure Children’s Centre to see how the training the staff there have had on responding to speech, language and communication needs is evident in how programmes are delivered, how information is presented to all young people and how individual’s communication needs are met. What an impressive place! Spending time at Court and over dinner with those involved in intermediary work (the term used for the court-appointed Communication Assistant roles we are starting to be appointed to in NZ for vulnerable witnesses, victims and defendants) was  also incredibly helpful as we develop the practice frameworks and training programmes needed around this work in NZ.Two of us are gearing up for a trip to the Asante Centre in Canada to receive specialised training in Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder later in the year.We’re also looking forward to the NZSTA National Speech-Language Therapy Conference in September. It is wonderful to see a range of presentations that relate to youth justice and working with vulnerable families on the programme.Unfortunately we will need to cancel the two days of training we were planning to host at the Fickling Centre on 21 October and 4 November. We have so many other commitments currently. We will schedule another general day of training in early 2017 so contact us for dates or to request something specific for your team.