About the speaker
Alice is a speech and language therapist. In her 34 years of working she has mostly focused on under 5s. This has included preventative work such as Sure Start and ECAT, from Talk to your Bump up to nursery. She has also worked with children showing features of DLD in a specialist early years setting. She mostly works in multi-disciplinary teams, especially with Education. She has delivered PDP programmes, many different workshops, keynote conference speeches and one to one support. She was the SLT in Plymouth’s “Fence at the Top” initiative, hosting Jean Gross as part of the Hello campaign. She has taught on Foundation degree and SLT training courses. She loves to see the child in their whole communicative environment. Working with Hanen and Elklan has added to her tools to support and value families and most especially early years staff to enable each child to develop language and communication to the best of their ability. She uses analogies to get each message across. Her key priorities are: Tuning into each unique child, embedding ideas and principles that support vocabulary and language into every day life and activities (ordinarily available provision) and creating strategies that adapt for each child, reducing pressure on practitioners to take a child out for special activities, helping each practitioner and parent to understand the key ingredients of language development, making each aspect clear, relevant and applied to daily life. Areas of particular focus include: improving story times, attachment and the links with early communication development, pretend play and attention development and their links with behaviour, early childhood trauma and the impact on communication development, and Most of all….. learning language and being with young children is such fun! Let’s enjoy the journey together.