Nursery World - Claire Whittaker: ‘We are now seeing a generation of children who are arriving at preschool unable to form basic sentences or share toys’

Claire explains how she feels she is leading the way in a revolutionary form of speech therapy, for which there is a huge demand in our post-pandemic world.

'Claire and I wrote lesson plans, found resources and started to get lessons filmed'.

I am a speech and language therapist. I have been working with children for more than 25 years and my passion has been to help children to talk, to be able to communicate, to be able to speak clearly, to follow verbal instruction and to be able to express themselves so that they can be heard.

In 2020 Claire Heslop and I (another speech therapist with over 25 years paediatric experience) decided to launch Speech Club when we realised how many children were needing speech therapy and not able to get access to a speech therapist.

Speech therapists are a rare breed of people. I’ve never met an unpleasant one or an impatient or dictatorial one. We have chosen this career because we want to help people, and our job satisfaction is based on the difference we can make rather than the salary we can earn.

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