Lauren Osborne

Hello parents and carers of children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), Here is a rare opportunity to share *your* thoughts on speech pathology for your child (or children!) 📣 Complete the survey: sydney.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bp… 📣 Please share widely! Thanks SLPs and families.

Following on from the @NAPLIC conference with @larchiba6. I have created a DLD outcomes poster for the outcomes we know so far. I’ll can upload a PDF version if anyone would like one for their service✨ Special thanks to @DLDandMe and @botting_nikki for the info/articles. 👏🏽

@naomicfisher Also, if you're trying to get the perfect attendance award, you're likely to attend school while contagious with various illnesses or head lice, and spread those to everyone else.

Today I heard from a parent that their son was terribly upset when he got covid, because it would ruin his 100% attendance record. At the end of the year, those with 100% get book tokens & certificates in assembly. She mentioned it in passing, she obviously didn’t think it was a big deal. It was just how school worked, and last year her son had got the award. Here’s why policies like that should stop. What’s the problem, you might think, with rewarding those who turn up day after day? Surely it’s just a nice little treat to recognise their commitment? And book tokens! How worthy. What’s the problem with free books for kids who take school seriously enough to make it in every day? As with all reward systems, however, we don’t think enough about those who don’t get the reward and the effect on them. Who are these kids? Well, it’s the children with serious illness - the mum then went on to tell me that one girl in his class has leukaemia, for example. Or the disabled child. Or the child with overwhelming anxiety. Or the child who became homeless with their mum due to domestic violence and has to go to the shelter in the night, and then doesn’t make it to school the next day. Or even the child whose dad died and who had a day off to attend the funeral. It’s the kids who find school most difficult and who have the most challenges who struggle to attend. What happens to them when everyone else goes up to get their book tokens? They sit in assembly watching, and they are punished. They are punished because the absence of a reward acts as a punishment for them. It’s a public punishment too, everyone knows that they didn’t make the grade. No free books for them. Tough. Whenever there are rewards, the flip side is punishment. When we reward one person, the others are punished by the absence. When we reward someone one year, and then not the next, that again the absence acts as a punishment. It makes them feel bad. Of course, we know this. We know that children feel bad when they don’t get something and others do. This is in fact pretty well how rewards are meant to work. They are meant to motivate. The idea is that children will try harder to get the reward. So what’s the problem? The problem is that 100% attendance isn’t about trying harder. It’s largely about luck, particularly at primary school. Luck not to get ill, luck to have a stable family, luck to be the kind of person who doesn’t find school overwhelmingly stressful. Luck to be the sort of person for whom life is a bit easier, in fact. Rewards for 100% attendance reward the lucky, and by doing so punish the unlucky. The lucky feel good and the unlucky feel bad. And that has other consequences. Because making those who find school attendance hard feel bad is very unlikely to make them more able to attend. They are already struggling, and now they’re being punished for it. It contributes to anxiety, because children are aware of the consequences of not getting 100%, and some of them will become really anxious about it. For others, it will contribute to their anger and their feelings that they aren’t valued as much as others. So yes, the proud children up the front of assembly can’t see a problem, and their parents think it’s ‘just a nice gesture’, but it’s so easy to ignore the effect on the least advantaged. We celebrate the winners and the losers are invisible, shamed into silence. The winners assume that the losers deserved to lose - they say that they worked hard for their awards, and the losers couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed and so why should they get book tokens? This happens again and again in our education system, and that’s why I keep on banging this drum. Every intervention should be evaluated for its impact on losers as well as winners. It’s not enough to pretend they could all be winners if they just tried hard enough. Sometimes people tell me that the attendance awards helped them learn that everyone is good at different things, because whilst they didn’t get attendance awards, they did well at other things and got awards for music or creative writing. Which is nice for them, but again, let’s think about the losers. For it’s not true that in a school context everyone is good at something. It’s not true that everyone gets awards somewhere. Some children learn that they aren’t good at anything. Not even turning up. These reward systems come up often when I talk to young people who are disillusioned and burnt out by school. The significance of book tokens goes beyond the money. That’s why it doesn’t work when parents say they’ll buy the book tokens instead, to try and lessen the pain of not getting the reward. Those book tokens, awarded in public in assembly, signify approval, status, validation - and to those who don’t get them, they signify the opposite

@speechwoman @SpeechPathAus I'm immediately skeptical when I see "Dyspraxia", do they mean Childhood Apraxia of Speech? Developmental Coordination Disorder? Or something else? Did you get any response from SPA?

Surprised to see this events.humanitix.com/2023-identific… in the Oct 25th @SpeechPathAus National eNews. The presenter seems to be a Cellfield, Sound Therapy, Tomatis, SoListen, Interactive Metronome, and Sensory Integration, etc. fan and it's doubtful that this event will be evidence-based.

This! It was October when I first recieved my #breastcancer diagnosis, and I found the month of "pink everywhere" really difficult.

I’m excited to share the news! @NancyYoung_ and I co-edited a book about Nancy’s wonderful infographic. Numerous chapter authors provide evidence-based guidance to support ALL learners in reading and writing. Dr. Reid Lyon called it “a masterpiece”! benchmarkeducation.com/y57360-climbin…

Ok @NDIS I'm going to reverse engineer your responses to families. You keep telling people that Developmental Language Disorder is NOT lifelong. I've provided 100s of references - can you provide 1 peer reviewed article to support the comments from your assessors? #DevLangDis

Here's a fun Speech Pathology week memory from 2012. That 2 year old is 13 now, he and his brother insist that odd socks are better than matching ones! Communication is so valuable, whether it's about small things (socks!) or bigger ones. #SPweek #SLPeeps #CommunicatingForLife

What are your best sources for books that provide a gentle introduction to 'normal' texts (i.e. non-decodable) for older readers still at the early stages of reading proficiency? (If you can't help, but are interested in the answers, please retweet.)

I am loving working on this new, very young strand of books with Macmillan. Cat Nap, Bird Bath, Hippo Potty and Chick Pea are an absolute joy to draw, and I’ve just received the green light to start on the final illustration for Cat Nap, which will be the first in this series.

I don't tweet much anymore (is it still called that?), but wanted to let the people who encouraged and supported me through my cancer treatment know- yesterday I had clear scans, which means 4 years cancer free! 🥳 #breastcancer #cancersucks

2 yrs ago today, my daughter had open heart surgery. She was 5. As a paediatrician, I felt helpless As a mum, I was terrified. One thing happened that day, one thing the anaesthetic team did that I will never forget... 👇🧵

@jacq1101 I see families who have a child with a disability, medical conditions, learning difficulties, additional needs, who choose private schooling because they think their child will be taken care of better there.

@speechieLO Yup. But it's not just about funding. Go anywhere in Australia that has private and public schools and ask many middle class families where they send their kids...it's also about status and aspiration.

"It is a lie to say private schools take pressure off the public system. In fact, it is the opposite. Private schools take money out of public classrooms. They entrench inequality. They create and maintain privilege."

@aliceleung Same son loves maths and used to want to be a maths teacher. Has now, at 13, changed his mind because of the pay and conditions. It's fascinating to have a child who thinks about money, I certainly didn't think about money like that at his age!

@aliceleung My son, when he was around 11 years old: "it will be sad when I am old enough to move out of home. I won't see you and Dad very much, because I won't be able to afford to live near here". Our non-fancy western Sydney suburb has a median house price above $1 mill.

The property next to us went for auction today. The bidding started at over $1M 😵‍💫. We live in a non-fancy western Sydney suburb. I worry about how my kids will get housing when they grow up.

“Private institutions, by definition, do not serve the public good. This whopping misdirection of shared resources away from shared outcomes is corrosive to the nation’s longterm educational interest – as well as morally disgusting.” theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

@caragleeson48 I'm not a teacher... but could you discuss this with his teacher, and maybe agree to him setting some goals, and receiving tickets focused on those goals, rather than on general classroom expectations? Maybe tickets for trying something new, asking for help, being kind to others?

@phonakins Re: the software billionaire, maybe we're meant to care in a Jane Austen-esque way, afterall, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single many in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife".