Leah is a qualified Speech and Language Therapist and has been working as part of the team at Cardiff met since 2018.
Leah qualified as an SLT at UCL and began her career working as a paediatric SLT in Ealing West London. In this post Leah work as part of an early years team visiting mainstream nurseries and primary schools as well as special needs nurseries. Leah then took on a specialist SLT role working with the nursery and mainstream schools’ team in Lambeth central London. From here Leah moved to Gloucestershire where she worked across children centres, nurseries and a community clinic providing speech and language therapy assessment and intervention for a varied paediatric caseload. In this role Leah also provided additional support to a group of local authority and private nurseries working with them via advice and training to support speech, language and communication in their setting and ensure early identification and referral to SLT.
It was following this Leah moved back to Cardiff taking on a role working within a language unit supporting children with severe and specific speech and language difficulties alongside a role in a special school, working specifically with autistic children. Leah then took on a highly specialist and SLT team lead position working in a special school where a large percentage of the children had a diagnosis of ASD. During her time in this role Leah completed a Masters in ASD.
Leah began working at Cardiff Met as a Practice Educator Facilitator supporting clinical education. She completed her PGC in teaching in higher education and became a fellow of Higher Education Academy.
Leah is now a lecturer at Cardiff Met and teaches across the years. Leah also had a role as disability coordinator for the programme and meets with students to identify reasonable adjustments to support them during their clinical placements.
Leah is a member of the professional body, RCSLT and the regulating body, HCPC.
Leah is a specialist paediatric speech and language therapist.
Leah’s teaching includes:
Clinical and professional skills
Neurodiversity
Autism
ADHD
Social communication disorder
Pathological demand avoidance
Selective mutism
Dysfluency
SLT and counselling
Research supervision
Leah’s research interests are in autism. During her Masters Leah explored parent/cares of children with autism and SLTs who work with children with autism views and experiences of parent/carers role in therapy. Leah is particularly interested in how SLTs support parent/carers to feel able to take an active role across their child/young person’s therapy journey.
Leah also has an interest in how SLTs can work with education professionals to support children’s speech, language and communication through ensuring environments facilitate these skills.
