ABOUT Me

I qualified as a Speech & Language Therapist in 1999 from De Montfort University, Leicester, and began working as a generalist paediatric therapist in the Bradford community.

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It was in my final placement at university, working alongside a specialist therapist in supporting children with hearing loss, that I discovered my interest in this area. It wasn’t long into my career that I took a trainee specialist role in deafness/hearing loss.

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Initially I worked in a school for the Deaf, a resource unit for deaf children in a mainstream school and alongside the peripatetic Teachers of the Deaf team in the community, supporting children and young people from birth to 18 years old to develop their listening, speech, language and communication skills.

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In 2005, I joined the multidisciplinary team at the Yorkshire Auditory Implant Service (YAIS), where I worked as a Principal Speech and Language Therapist for 18 years. My role involved supporting children and their families throughout the cochlear implant assessment process, and following implantation I continued to monitor each child’s progress while offering guidance to families and the local professionals working with them. Training was also a significant part of my work, and I was fortunate to both attend and present at international conferences during my time at YAIS.

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during this time I completed my Auditory Verbal Therapy (AVT) training and qualified in 2018. Seeing the significant impact this approach has on outcomes for children with hearing loss transformed my entire practice. AVT not only changed the way I support deaf children, but many of its strategies, particularly parent coaching, which sits at the heart of AVT, have become invaluable tools for helping a wide range of children and families.

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In 2023, I made the decision to leave the NHS and begin independent practice. During this time, I also started working with the charity AVUK, providing Auditory Verbal Therapy to families locally in person and to families across the UK through online sessions. Because AVT is a parent‑coaching approach, it can be delivered effectively either in person or remotely, allowing more families to access this specialist support.

 

I have practised independently for a number of years alongside my NHS work and formally launched Sunflower SLT in 2023. Through this work, I support a wide range of speech, language and communication needs. Although I specialise in hearing loss, my caseload regularly includes children with co‑occurring difficulties such as language delay / disorder, speech sound disorder and autism. This allows me to maintain and expand my expertise across these areas, ensuring I can provide comprehensive, evidence‑based support.

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In 2025, I completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Sensory Integration and qualified as an Advanced Sensory Integration Practitioner. My interest in this field began through my own experience as a parent of a child with sensory processing difficulties. With support from a fellow therapist, we accessed sensory integration intervention, and I saw first‑hand the positive impact it had on my daughter’s ability to regulate, engage and participate in daily life. This experience motivated me to pursue formal training so I could offer the same support to other families navigating similar challenges.

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I am committed to ongoing learning so I can offer evidence‑based, effective support to the children and families I work with.