About Me | karenfentonslt

About Me

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I love to work with children, their families and adults who stammer to encourage them to be happy, confident communicators. I am a specialist speech and language therapist in the field of stammering and I have received extensive training at the Michael Palin Centre where I worked for 8 years before moving into independent practise. I continue to support the Centre with assessments when needed and continue to learn from both them and the stammering community themselves.

Working with children/young people who stammer also means that I work with children who stammer who also have additional communication needs. I also have a smaller caseload of children who don't stammer but instead have speech sound and/or language difficulties. I'm happy to see children in homes or school settings and I love seeing them develop their skills to enhance their communication too.

Alongside my clinical skills I also provide training for teaching staff about stammering and general speech, language and communication needs.

Qualifications

BMedSci Speech Sciences from the University of Sheffield in 2000 which gave me my qualification to practice.
MSc in Joint Professional Practise: Language and Communication in 2012 from City University/Institute of Education which focused on psychological approaches in health and education to understand more about the needs of children with speech, language and communication needs.
I have training and experience in CBT, Solution Focused Brief Therapy, Mindfulness and Avoidance Reduction Therapy.
I am also an Accredited Palin PCI therapist.
I am a member of the National Stammering CEN and have recently attended the 14th Oxford Stammering and Cluttering Research Conference.
I am registered with the Health and Care Professionals Council (HCPC), the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT)and the Association of Speech and Language Therapists in Independent Practise (ASLTIP).
I am also trained using the Nuffield Dyspraxia Programme and have experience of working with children with Developmental disorders. I am on the Natural Language Acquisition Therapist Registry following training in Gestalt Language Processing (GLP).