Learning from the experiences of disabled SLTs: Part 2 of 2

A report, ‘SLTs on the tight rope: Learning from the experiences of disabled SLTs in the workplace’ (April 2025) by Mélanie Gréaux explores the experiences of disabled Speech and Language Therapists and what we can do to promote disability inclusion in the speech and language therapy profession. (You can hear more about this in the first podcast of this set of two.)

In this second podcast some of our members with disability discuss importance of the report and issues it raises including the:

• Challenges disabled SLTs and SLT students face in the workplace;
• Impact of ableism;
• How colleagues can engage;
• Value their disabilities bring to the profession.  

With thanks to panellists:

• Jodee Simpson - Highly Specialist autistic Speech and Language Therapist and Masters Research student and co-founder of the Neurodivergent SLT network
• Claire Westwood - Designated Clinical Officer for SEND - Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust 
• Suzi Willis – Senior Lecturer in Speech & Language Therapy & MSc (pre-reg) SLT Programme Lead, Manchester Metropolitan University 
  (All the panellists are members of the RCSLT's Disability Working Group and Jodee also represents the RCSLT's Neurodiversity Working Group)

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

Transcript Name: 

learning-from-the-experiences-of-disabled-slts-part-2-of-2 (3)          

Transcript Date: 

30 July 2025

Speaker Key (delete/anonymise if not required): 

HOST:                         JACQUES STRAUSS

JODEE:                       JODEE SIMPSON

SUZI:                           SUZI WILLIS 

CLAIRE:                      CLAIRE WESTWOOD           

MUSIC PLAYS: [0:00:00-0:00:05] 

HOST:                        0:00:05 Welcome to the RCSLT podcast. My name is Jacques Strauss. This episode is the second in which we look at disability following the report published early in April entitled ‘SLTs on the tightrope. Learning from the experience of disabled SLTs in the workplace’. 

We’ve been talking to members of the working group who contributed to the report and who were kind enough to share their personal experiences of how disability impacted them in their professional lives. I started by asking the panel to introduce themselves.

JODEE:                      0:00:39 Well, I’m JODEE Simpson. I’m a speech and language therapist based up here in Yorkshire. I’m currently an independent practice, because it’s how I could manage my disability and my chronic fatigue that I’m experiencing. But I’m also the co-founder of the neurodivergent SLT network, which has about 400 members now that are all neurodivergent. Huge, huge support to those that are exploring their neurodivergence or have already had diagnosis or are on waiting lists. I’m bringing a lot of experience today from the stories that I’ve heard.

SUZI:                           0:01:17 Hi, I’m Suzi Willis, I’m a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and I’m the masters pre-reg, this is people who have already have a degree and want to be a speech therapist programme lead. And I have been involved since the beginning of the disability working group and I felt that it was important to have visibility regarding my role in supporting our future colleagues with regard to their mental health and my own mental health and anxiety, and embracing the diversity within the profession with our new students who apply to be a speech and language therapist, but also in the lens that students bring about themselves and their own disabilities and those of their colleagues.

CLAIRE:                      0:02:09 Hi, I’m Claire Westwood. I am the designated clinical officer for children with additional educational needs and disabilities at Sandwell & West Birmingham NHS Trust. I’m also a member of the disabled SLTs working group. I’m really happy to be having these conversations together in community with people rather than just having all these thoughts in my head on my own, so I’m looking forward to the chat today.

HOST:                        0:02:34 Jodee, why did you think it was important for this report to be created?

JODEE:                       0:02:40 I started up the peer support group in 2022, after a six-month period off sick with mental health. I was diagnosed with complex PTSD and I went back to work thinking, I know I’m going to need some adjustments when I go back to work, because the PTSD was really massively impacting on both my daily living and my concentration levels. And I knew I was going to need some support and I didn’t know where to go for that support. Because I went to Occupational Health and they suggested a desk lamp, which you may hear the sarcasm/irony in my voice there, because it felt inadequate, it was inadequate. But also the fact that none of the Occupational Health team had had any training in how to support autistic members of the workforce.

                                    That’s where I started, feeling like I was the only person experiencing these things. So, I started to reach out to social media and found out that there was actually a lot of other neurodivergent speech and language therapists. So I just had this idea, spur of the moment, the PTSD gave me a massive impulsive drive, which I put to good use and formed this group.

                                    And it turned out, when we all started talking together, that we were actually all experiencing very, very similar things. Lots of stories of discrimination. But one of the things I think that shocked me the most was people’s feeling of not belonging in the speech and language therapy profession. When we’re with our clients feeling so akin to them, because many of the people we support are neurodivergent too and disabled, and because of our own lived experience with that, we just often… A lot of us report feeling like we get on better with our clients than we do in the workplace. Because there’s so much expected of us in the workplace it doesn’t align with our own values and our communication styles.

                                    I was really, really pleased actually that this report was commissioned and that we actually, as a group, we decided what the questions were going to be. Because we were basing it on our own lived experiences. I think it’s been a really good way to start this conversation. 

SUZI:                           0:04:58 I think, interestingly enough, the experience of people has been so invisible and the report, that visibility, I think is very empowering. And also, in my perception and in also talking to other folks in the disability working group, is that actually quite painful. And those experiences that are shared and, yes, those are visible, but actually it’s acknowledging that those journeys for ourselves and our colleagues and how the report does that. And it’s the next steps with supporting each other and our students and our profession in that journey. 

And I still have students telling me know, they go on placement and their practice educator has said to them, why didn’t you tell me about your disability, what am I supposed to do? I am flabbergasted and I have them coming back and emotionally they’ve been squashed. I just think we’re in 2025 and this report has illuminated so much and yet our colleagues aren’t embracing it.

CLAIRE:                      0:06:12 Hopefully seeing this, people will feel less alone and also feel like they have more evidence or more reasoning to take to managers to get what they need and to know it’s not just them going through this, which I hope will be really useful for a lot of people.

HOST:                         0:06:29 Susie, we’ve touched on this a little and discussed it in the last podcast, but can you talk to us about what challenges disabled SLTs face in the workplace today?

SUZI:                           0:06:39 My experience is not holistic, and I need to say that. Because for students and for my colleagues and everyone in the disability working group, the challenges to be, if your disability is not visible, is the process of making it visible and talking about your needs. And I think that is a difficult process depending which context you’re in and whether automatically, with ableism, you’re being discriminated against by the processes that really have a different lens and a perspective to that holistic view of us as people. 

And whether you have a physical disability or mental health or long-term health condition, and, and, and, it’s that that I think is some of the challenges that workplaces come with and actually, on a student perspective, if I take it to our students and I agree with JODEE about students going, well I have a disability, I have mental health, I have anxiety, but oh gosh, here’s my lecturer who’s 34 years into the profession, who’s saying, that’s okay, it’s all good, you are valuable, you enrich our profession.

                                    But I worry about the institutional processes, whether it’s in education with different assessments and placements and expectations on placements around incremental development of competence, but in the workplace how, in a busy NHS and demanding situation, I really worry for my colleagues around their support and how their needs are being addressed and that they are not being discriminated against. Which I know they are.

CLAIRE:                     0:08:31 I would agree that there are different levels which Melanie identified in her report of difficulties and experience. And one of the things that really drew me was around reasonable adjustments and Melanie’s finding that one third of SLTs have had requests for reasonable adjustments denied or declined. And we know, it’s in law, the Equality Act is a legal thing that has to be put in place. But so many policies within institutions make it up to manager’s discretion and then that’s where the ambiguity comes in, where managers can make those decisions and if you don’t feel you can challenge that further, it gets left there and you’re expected to just continue as it.

                                    And that is something I’ve heard about a lot. A shameless plight for the book that JODEE and I are involved in that is coming out soon, with J & P Press about disabled SLTs experiences. And there’s a lot in there about reasonable adjustments being declined and then what do you do then? If your manager’s telling you can’t have the support you need for whatever reason, what do you do, how do you stay in that role, how do you support your clients and how do you stay well, both physically and mentally.

HOST:                         0:09:38 Does anyone want to jump in on whether they think this is a more systemic problem or an attitudinal problem?

CLAIRE:                     0:09:47 I’m doing actually a study at the moment on professional identity of neurodivergent speech and language therapists. And that has massively opened my eyes to some of the systemic issues.

                                    First of all, I think the curriculum itself privileges neurotypical ways of thinking. I’ll give you an example. I remember having to do roleplays, I hate roleplays, I’ve always hated them. Because they’re really hard to do, because I’m not very good at thinking on the spot, I have to script things. But I remember being told you have to imagine that you’re in somebody else’s shoes, how would you react and how would you want somebody to communicate with you, for example. How would you want them to show empathy. 

                                    I reflected on that, on how I would want somebody to communicate with me, and then I looked at the marking criteria and how I wanted somebody to communicate with me, to be empathetic with me, wasn’t reflected in the mark scheme. It was actually very, very low. Being direct in communication, not skirting around difficult topics, like prognosis or the reality of someone’s communication difference. Those are things that are not necessarily valued.

SUZI:                           0:11:05 I really agree with you with regard to, well, this is the way to learn. We all learn in different ways. To really support our students and to also make communication difference visible. We’ve had autistic SLTs come in, talk to the students, say, hey I’m in the house, we’re real, it’s okay, we are not less than. And that’s that institutional, historic societal type of perspective and, educationally, even when we look at how we’re setting session aims; an autistic child should have eye contact. Why? But, historically, well that’s good communication. Is it?

JODEE:                       0:11:53 The other week I went to a conference, but I didn’t realise how internalised and upsetting it was for me to hear autistic people being described as disordered. Because when they were describing ‘them’, othering ‘them’ as disordered, they were also othering me as disordered. Because I am more part of that group than I am part of the neurotypical group.

                                    I wonder whether that’s some of the language that we’re using in SLT, who describe language difference but calling it disordered, whether that, in itself, is what’s making us feel like we don’t belong, because we’re being othered with those groups. But our colleagues don’t see us as part of that group, they see us… Because I’ve had people say to me, you don’t represent the people we support, because they’ve got learning disabilities, as well as autism. But I feel more like them. When I recognise the things that they’re going through, I recognise it in myself, because I’ve been through these things too.

                                    And I thought that was a really interesting finding from the report. She basically said that the disabled SLT who had disabilities that were more visible, actually felt more in the spotlight but in a negative way, that they were being judged for their disability. Because I notice that, after I had had my six months off and I went back to work, I started having some exploration, I’m going to say, of fidgets to help manage the anxiety that I was experiencing. The anxiety that I’ve always experienced. 

                                    How I used to manage my anxiety was basically by feeling overwhelmed, like in a meeting, and then excusing myself to go to the toilet, having a massive panic attack, pulling myself together, trying to suppress those feelings. And often I’d be hyperventilating as well. And then sort my face out, go back in. Nobody ever seemed to have noticed that I’d had a massive panic attack.

                                    When I went back, I thought, I can’t live like this, it’s not right to live like this. 

So, I thought, right, I’m going to take fidgets. I got fidgets. I started using them in the office. But then I started to notice that my colleagues, because then it made my anxiety visible, then started to get very worried about me and actually asked whether I should be in work. They associated using fidgets with being very, very anxious. But it made it visible. Then I put my fidgets away, because it was too in the spotlight. And, actually, I ended up having a very serious mental health crisis after that.

HOST:                         0:14:32 CLAIRE, what do you think the impact is of ableism on disabled SLTs.

CLAIRE:                     0:14:38 I think it’s varied and it depends on your experience and it depends on your employer, but I think often the effort of managing your own condition or disability, combined with masking in the workplace, if you are masking combined with asking for your reasonable adjustments, it’s exhausting. It’s truly, truly exhausting. And it’s relentless. And if you move jobs, you’re starting all over again. If you get a new boss, you’re starting all over again. And you’re managing perhaps hospital appointments, you’re managing the absolute rubbish that is things like Access to Work processes and we know that accessing healthcare is a challenge in the UK for a lot of people right now. So, you’re trying to do all that in the background as well as your job as an SLT.

                                    You’re giving your all to your job as an SLT whilst also almost having another full-time job of disability manager. I think a lot of non-disabled or neurotypical colleagues don’t see all of the stuff going on behind the scenes. And then you have some of these conversations and Jodee mentioned about the question being asked, should you be in work? And I find that threshold from non-disabled colleagues really interesting, of should you be in work, and you’re like, well I’m like this every day, so if I don’t come in today, I’m not in on any day, so I’m just going to have to deal with it. It’s a different threshold I find for some disabled and neurodivergent people.

                                    It can affect how you see yourself professionally. There are a lot of positive aspects, like has been mentioned about how you relate to the people you support as a speech therapist, and that can be a real positive in your fight for disability justice for the people you’re supporting. But there are a lot of exhausting things which ironically can then exacerbate your symptoms of your disability.

HOST:                         0:16:33 It’s interesting that we talk about making reasonable accommodations, etc., but what came up in the report is that often non-disabled colleagues might feel resentful about certain situations. What do you think the attitude is of non-disabled colleagues?

JODEE:                      0:16:50 I think resentment is the right word. I’ve had so many people, even managers, say to me, it’s not fair you having this. I thought about this a lot more just recently and I thought, I took that really personally to start with, but now I thought, why are they saying it’s not fair, are they saying that they would benefit from this too? So why, if other people feel that they would benefit from this, because it’s not fair that I get it and they don’t, then why aren’t we doing something for all of us? Why aren’t we saying, well actually maybe we’d all benefit from accessible technology, maybe we’d all benefit from actually having a smaller caseload but we work through them more quickly because then we don’t have as many people to hold in our heads.

                                    Because I know I had a phase where I had 10 people on my caseload instead of 20. Over a six-month period, I still got through the same number of people on my caseload as anybody else but I was still seen as, well you’re not working at full capacity. Well, how’s that, how’s that?

SUZI:                           0:17:50 Colleagues who have our students on placements and their perception if they make reasonable adjustments, some are fantastic and some people go, well but how are they going to do the job in the real world? Whoa, easy tiger! You are not here to make that judgement and it’s wrong, that is not your role. The colleague, as in these are my colleagues there, I’m not having that experience but my students are. 

And that idea that you’re [inaudible 0:18:23] unless you can do it the way that I do it and I, that SLT supervising them, doesn’t have a disability. So that has made me wonder, if I was in that workplace, that relationship, and that’s obviously come out in the report around that absolute rigidity with what you are supposed to be able to manage in the way that you’re supposed to be able to manage it. And I seeing that with our students and their experiences, telling me about that. 

  And when you have three-way meetings, I have one with the practice educator, my tutee and myself, they’re having offline conversations going, they’re not going to manage, they can’t do this, they can’t do that. Well, no, they can’t do it in the way you can but also you forget you’ve had 15 years of experience. But the lack of insight is part of it.

  And that worries me, because of all the things that the report illuminated and the conversations that have been had are not being embraced.

HOST:                         0:19:27 On the flipside, how do disabled SLTs view the value that their disability can bring to their professional practice?

SUZI                            0:19:37 What it brings, I feel, to our profession is that, actually, we need and bring so much with regard to being honest and real and visible and we connect. I can’t fix somebody’s head injury, but I can be with the family and be in that journey and be connected and be real. 

                                    And I think, within the profession with disability, we work with people who have challenges and I would want to be visible with my own challenges, as a speech and language therapist, and how that supports students in feeling valued and that navigating that and that authenticity with each other in the profession, with our other allied health professionals, and with the people that we work with and their families.

CLAIRE:                      0:20:35 I find in my current role, where I’m working a lot with families in the community, that being able to share… I was a disabled child in this community, it takes away some of the tokenistic saviour complex that I’m not going to swoop in and try and fix or save something, but I’m here with you in solidarity, trying to come to a solution for the challenges you’re facing. And I feel like having lived experience it’s just a really strong way to do that. 

And I don’t think that’s as valued as it could be. Especially like Susie mentioned, with students where perhaps you haven’t got the validation of your qualification yet and you are entirely reliant on your current status as a student, but your lived experience brings so much I think it’s incredibly valuable.

SUZI                            0:21:22 Promoting that over and over and over again, about you matter, your lived experience matters, it will matter to the families that you work with. That is really what I’m really passionate about, because that’s one of the ways that will change our profession, moving forward. The future of our profession is having that lens and perspective that this is right, this is not about tokenism, this is the movement forward, where we are in our profession and disabled SLTs.

JODEE:                       0:21:55 I think that our profession is at a tipping point in our professional identity. We’re in danger of our profession becoming fragmented, if we don’t start looking at our professional identity and our identity that is one of diversity and inclusion.

                                    We’re seeing a lot of resistance to changing the way we do things, we’re encouraging outside the box thinkers but we’re expecting them to work within the box that we define. 

                                    If we resist and reject changes that are really, really uncomfortable to bring about because we need to look at our own privilege, we need to look at the power that we hold and we have to learn to share that power and have some really, really honest conversations about our profession.

                                    Or, do we engage in resistance and move forward embracing and understanding our own privilege and power and working together, as a profession, to create a new identity that embraces and makes everyone feel like one profession again.

HOST:                         0:23:08 A very big thank you to all of our guests for making the time to join us today. Please see the show notes for resources that may be of interest. Until next time, keep well.

MUSIC PLAYS: 0:23:08-0:23:27