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Speak Out
August 2016
www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.auNorthern
Territory
NT 44
Members
Branch
News
as at June 2016
Working as the
sole Speech Pathologist in seventeen Catholic Schools across the
Northern Territory offers many diverse experiences and challenges. One day I may be
assessing a student in an urban Darwin classroom, and the next I might be providing a
workshop to Indigenous teachers in a remote community school. I love the diversity of
working across a large geographical region; our team services schools in urban areas such
as Darwin, Alice Springs and Katherine as well as the remote areas of Daly River, Wadeye,
Bathurst Island and Santa Teresa. I am surrounded by an extremely
hard-working and supportive team including two psychologists, an
occupational therapist and four inclusion support advisors who make my
job that much easier and more rewarding. In order to provide services to
such a large geographical region, our team employs a model where each
inclusion support advisor is the key contact to number of schools. The
inclusion support advisors take on a generalist support role and will refer
students to the specialists in our team (osychologist, speech pathologist
and occupational therapist) when these services are required.
Darwin is a small, geographically isolated community, which makes it
all the more important to connect with local speech pathologists. Since
arriving in the top end, I have been grateful to find friendly speechies who
are so generous in supporting one another. The SPA NT Branch is small
in number, but is very welcoming to newcomers such as myself, when I
arrived last year from Queensland.
In recent weeks, Catholic Education NT has begun a project to install a
sound field system in every classroom of our seventeen schools across the
Northern Territory. Many children in the Northern Territory present with a hearing impairment,
with a high percentage of these students coming from an Indigenous background. This
project is aimed to support all students in increasing their ability to process auditory
information in the classroom as well as to ensure our teachers are looking after their
voices! In my position as speech pathologist, I have a key role in the coordination of the
purchase, installation and ongoing training of the sound field systems. I was fortunate to
recently attend a presentation from Deadly Ears QLD about improving hearing acoustics in
classrooms and will incorporate these findings into the rollout of the sound field systems.
The many benefits of sound field systems for our students and the positive response from
school principals and teachers, is motivation for ensuring the rollout of the sound field
systems commences in the near future.
Ashleigh Morris
Catholic Education NT Speech Pathologist
Diversity in Darwin