RCSLT News May 2025: update from CEO Steve Jamieson, plus news of exciting policy wins

The May news podcast for the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists featuring Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs, and Steve Jamieson, CEO for the RCSLT. Published 27 May 2025.

In this month’s news podcast RCSLT CEO joins us to talk about the 80th birthday celebrations; the Equality, Diversity and Belonging (EDB) work with members; the leadership programme; applications for new governance roles and more. 

Derek Munn shares some exciting wins for the profession around the UK and outlines some areas of focus for the policy team over the coming months.

This interview was conducted by Victoria Harris, Head of Learning at The Royal College of Speech and produced and edited by freelance producer Jacques Strauss.

Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.

Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey: uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3R

Transcript

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HOST:                         0:00:05 It’s Tuesday, 27 May, and I'm Vicki Harris, Head of Learning at the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, the RCSLT. I'm here, as always, with Derek Munn, Director of Policy and Public Affairs. But we also have a special guest, Steve Jamieson, who is the RCSLT’S CEO. 

We’re going to be hearing a lot about what Steve has been up to, hearing about a lot of initiatives that RCSLT is involved in, and Derek will be giving the context about what's happening in the world of speech and language therapy. 

So, Steve, welcome back to the podcast. It's lovely to have you here today. I wonder if you can give listeners a flavour of what you've been up to recently, please. 

STEVE:                       0:00:43 Sure. Thank you, Vicky, and delighted to be here today to just share some of the work that I've been doing and the organisation have been involved in. But I think, first of all, I want to say a very happy 80th birthday to the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. It's our 80th anniversary this year, and just last week we held an amazing event at Southwark Cathedral, where we had almost 400 members and key stakeholders join us for that celebration. 

A great milestone to reach, and lots of exciting things happening over the anniversary year. Again, just wanted to say a very happy birthday to all of our members. 

I guess I just wanted to share with our listeners around the current strategic plan that we're working on. We're getting near to the end of our plan. It was a five-year strategic plan previously, which we are about to round up over the next 12 months. A lot has been achieved in those five years. Obviously, those five years took over during the COVID issue as well, but we've been able to achieve a great deal within that. 

But I think what's really exciting is that we're now looking to start preparing for our next strategic plan, which will be for a three-year period this time. What excites me about that is that we will be involving our membership a great deal in the planning for that strategy. And so, over the next 12 months – probably starting in autumn time – we will be doing lots of task and finish groups, we'll be looking at lots of meetings with members across the four nations to hear what they would like RCSLT to be focusing on in its next three-year strategy.

We'll be working with members, with staff, with our board of trustees, with external stakeholders as well, just to help us get a really good feel about what's needed out there. 

I think one of the key things that I've said since coming in as chief exec and what I really want to make sure we do is listen to our members, but also to engage our members in that future direction. The membership engagement piece and the membership offer piece, for me, is really important. I think we've done a lot to engage our members, but I think we could be doing even more. And so, I want to make sure that we hear the voice of our membership really clearly within our next strategic plan. 

We're getting ready for that, so I would just say to all our listeners, please keep eyes and ears open for a call-out to get involved with our strategic planning – probably from autumn time onwards, so just to give you the heads-up on that.

We've had a really exciting time just now of going through our interview process for our new board of trustees, for our committees, and we've had over 50 applicants for those positions, which is amazing. The interviews are just taking place right now and I hope that, fairly soon, we'll be able to let those successful candidates know that they are part of our board or part of our committee structures moving forward. It's a great opportunity to take part in the future direction of the organisation. I just want to congratulate the staff and those people involved in the whole process of interviews, including lots of members being on the panels, to get us through those 50 applications or 50 interview processes. 

It's great, and really exciting to have new people on our committees and boards, so that's something to look forward to as well. 

HOST:                         0:04:09 That's really interesting, and I'm really excited to hear about all the ways we're engaging members. And I know that you've made a really strong point of getting out there to listen to members as well and getting them involved. I wonder if you could tell us what pieces of work you're spearheading. 

STEVE:                       0:04:25 As you know, I've been out probably twice a month, two to three times a month. So, I’m out visiting members across the four nations. And that's really important for a couple of reasons. One is that I get to meet our members and they get to meet the chief exec, and they get to be able to tell me what they think about the Royal College, what they think we need to be doing differently, and also the good things that they're getting from their membership with us. It's really important that I take those issues back to the executive team and to the board of trustees to look at how we can improve the offer to our members. 

One of the key things that a lot of our members were saying was about their leadership experience, especially when they get to band 6 and 7s where, in fact, it's quite difficult to get on leadership programmes. 

Last year, we were really successful and got funding from our board to be able to run our first Inspire Leadership programme. We had 106 applicants for that programme, and we were only able to offer 18 places to our members. They started last October and, in fact, just last month they finished their programme for the year. 

I have to say, a really successful programme. Our members had three events in-house here in London, and then lots of evening events, led by key stakeholders, key leaders in the profession of speech and language therapy, but also key leaders in the world of health. So, I've been delighted with the progress of this Inspire programme. 

They also had to present a project which was really interesting to hear all 18 present their projects here on how they've developed their leadership skills over the past 12 months. 

Really delighted to say that we've now agreed to be able to run our second cohort. We will be going out to advert in the next four to six weeks, and that programme will then start in October again. So, anybody who's interested, please keep your eyes and ears open for a call for the next Inspire Leadership programme. 

The second thing I wanted just to say was that, as I've been going out and meeting members, there's been another issue for me around our senior leaders. And often, we have speech and language therapists who have reached the heights of being directors of allied health professions, people who've become chief executives of large trusts who are speech and language therapists, and there isn't a voice within the Royal College… there wasn't a voice within the Royal College, up until now, for those senior leaders to get together and develop a network. 

So, Derek Munn and I have been able to pull together a number of those key members to develop our network programme. We've only had a couple of meetings so far, but already we've probably got about 20 senior leaders who have joined that network, and we will continue to grow that. 

As I say, it's early days, but again, it's a really exciting opportunity for us to work closely with those senior leaders and for those senior leaders to offer us something back to the Royal College.

I guess I just want to finish by saying the other key pieces around our equity, diversity, and belonging strategy, which we've developed alongside a number of our key members, and we are continuing to develop this strategy. The strategy was launched three months ago, but now we're looking at all of the various work streams and working with our members to get those work streams up and running. Again, really exciting piece of work, which we will see developing over the next 12-24 months. 

And then finally, I think, Vicky, what I'd like to say is that, as I've been out meeting members across the four nations, I just want to say how humbled I am to be able to witness some of the amazing work that our members do in all the different areas that they cover within speech and language therapy. And I just want to thank them for making me and for making RCSLT so welcome when we do our visits, but also helping us to take the profession forward. I think the world of speech and language therapy is really in safe hands when I witness a lot of the work that those members are doing. 

HOST:                         0:08:23 Thank you, Steve. I'm going to go to Derek now. What's been happening around the UK that will be of interest to listeners? 

DEREK:                      0:08:28 Very briefly, I'll update on a few areas where we have made some impact, and then I can finish by talking about a couple of key issues which are facing us right now. 

So, I'd like to begin in Northern Ireland, if I could, where we have been working hard for a long time to persuade the Northern Ireland government about a need for more student places. Whereas in England universities can just decide whether or not they want to offer a speech therapy course, in Wales and Northern Ireland student numbers are still determined by the governments there. And after extensive long-term lobbying, we were delighted recently to have a doubling in the number of student places for the Northern Ireland speech therapy course this coming autumn. Only one year at the moment, so we need to keep the pressure on them. 

Another lobbying campaign which has come to fruition after years of work is around a clear children and young people's language position within Scotland, and the Scottish Government's programme for government – the equivalent to the King's Speech in Westminster for the year ahead, has finally said that there's going to be a children's speech language programme in Scotland. We've been working for the best part of a decade to get to that point. 

Primary progressive aphasia, I've mentioned in recent months that we have been trying to persuade NHS England that this should be missioned nationally as a specialist service, and we've won that argument. Primary aggressive progressive aphasia will now be part of a national specification. We need now to make sure that speech and language therapy is properly recognised in it. 

At the other end ELSEC (Early Language Support for Every Child, a government funded programme that provides support for children with speech, language and communication needs), work with children's workforce to try and make best use of the whole children's workforce. We had an announcement just last week, as we record, to say that the ELSEC programme will be extended for a further year, which is excellent news. 

We've also been invited to give evidence to a couple of committees in the House of Commons. The House of Commons Modernisation Committee want to talk to us about our proposals to make the proceedings in Parliament and visiting Parliament more communication accessible, and we'll be doing that in June. And we recently gave evidence to the Education Select Committee on their inquiry into what they term ‘SEND crisis’ in England. 

And apropos of that, we are all on standby. There have been increasing rumours and briefs going on that something quite radical may happen around education, health and care plans. We don't know yet, but it seems like the government is preparing the ground for that as a means of dealing with the sheer volume of work in Special Educational Needs and Disability coming the way of local authority and local NHS’s, and the concentration of the resource amongst those children who have EHCPs alongside the wider needs of all children. 

Lastly, the 10-year plan for the NHS in England is June. The latest we hear is it may now be pushed into the first part of July. But following on from the Darzi review, which Steve was invited as our CEO to be part of, we are now waiting for the 10-year plan, which will outline the way forward. 

We already have the changes to integrated care boards alongside a significant cut to management. We now have a document which is called Model ICB (Integrated Care Board), which actually talks about additional functions for ICBs in some areas, but talks about a lot of areas being given back to individual NHS providers in this endless loop. And SEND is one of those things which is talked about moving back to individual providers. And this links to, in turn, the proposal to merge NHSE back into the Department of Health (DoH). So, the period between now and the summer, we're waiting on SEND reform, the 10-year plan, Model ICBs, and the first steps toward the NHS/DoH merger. In England, it's going to be a challenging and complex time in the policy landscape. 

HOST:                         0:12:37 Thank you both. I just want to tell the listeners about a couple of podcasts that are coming up next month. On 20 June, Derek will be back for the June news. And then in late June, we're preparing a podcast which is discussing the experiences of SLTs with disability as they navigate the profession, and this is following on from the publication of Mélanie Gréaux’s report: ‘SLTs on the tightrope: Learning from the experiences of disabled SLTs in the workplace’. 

Thank you very much, and goodbye. 

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