Speak Out August 2016

Branch News

Northern Territory

NT 44 Members as at June 2016

Diversity in Darwin

Working as the sole Speech Pathologist in seventeen Catholic Schools across the Northern Territory offers many diverse experiences and challenges. One day I may be assessing a student in an urban Darwin classroom, and the next I might be providing a workshop to Indigenous teachers in a remote community school. I love the diversity of working across a large geographical region; our team services schools in urban areas such as Darwin, Alice Springs and Katherine as well as the remote areas of Daly River, Wadeye,

Bathurst Island and Santa Teresa. I am surrounded by an extremely hard-working and supportive team including two psychologists, an occupational therapist and four inclusion support advisors who make my job that much easier and more rewarding. In order to provide services to such a large geographical region, our team employs a model where each inclusion support advisor is the key contact to number of schools. The inclusion support advisors take on a generalist support role and will refer students to the specialists in our team (osychologist, speech pathologist and occupational therapist) when these services are required. Darwin is a small, geographically isolated community, which makes it all the more important to connect with local speech pathologists. Since arriving in the top end, I have been grateful to find friendly speechies who are so generous in supporting one another. The SPA NT Branch is small in number, but is very welcoming to newcomers such as myself, when I arrived last year from Queensland. In recent weeks, Catholic Education NT has begun a project to install a sound field system in every classroom of our seventeen schools across the

Northern Territory. Many children in the Northern Territory present with a hearing impairment, with a high percentage of these students coming from an Indigenous background. This project is aimed to support all students in increasing their ability to process auditory information in the classroom as well as to ensure our teachers are looking after their voices! In my position as speech pathologist, I have a key role in the coordination of the purchase, installation and ongoing training of the sound field systems. I was fortunate to recently attend a presentation from Deadly Ears QLD about improving hearing acoustics in classrooms and will incorporate these findings into the rollout of the sound field systems. The many benefits of sound field systems for our students and the positive response from school principals and teachers, is motivation for ensuring the rollout of the sound field systems commences in the near future.

Ashleigh Morris Catholic Education NT Speech Pathologist

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August 2016 www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au

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