Clinical Excellent Network for SLTs working with children and young people who are looked after or care experienced.

We invite speech and language therapists to join us for our first face to face meeting on the SLT's working in Children's social care CEN.

The Agenda will include

Judy Clegg, University of Sheffield: sharing her recent paper

Being understood: Neurodivergent care leavers’ perspectives on their own communication skills (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02656590251411749)

She'll also be sharing current/planned research related to care experienced young people and care leavers.

Valuing Kinship Care: Information from the 2025 report shared by a representative from the Centre of Care https://centreforcare.ac.uk/publications/valuing-kinship-care-in-england

Followed by a discussion about the implications for us, and how we work with kinship families and support them in our areas.

Life Story work - what it is, why it is important and how we can support as SLTs.

Presentation from specialist therapeutic social worker Rosie Stratford and follow up discussion about resources and practical ways in which we can support young people to understand their life stories.

Author Katie Bennett will be joining us to share her children's book: A Roma Celebration

Katie will also talk about her life as a foster carer specialising in supporting children from a Roma background

Social worker’s toolbox

What is this website and how could it be useful to you.

Picture This - Speech Therapist Toria Crooks will share learning from Picture This training created by the Voice and Influence Team of Care Leavers in Sheffield which is a fun creative session that:

- Reflects on the importance of the language we use with the children we work with and saying it how it is.

- Gives practice drawing and exploring how we can use pictures alongside words to explain plans and what’s happening- whatever the age.

Brief discussion: AI in our area of work, brief discussion on how we use AI and what questions we have. AI specialist Rachel Barton will hopefully be joining our spring meeting online so we can send queries to her in advance!

AGM - We'll have a brief AGM to set out the plan for the CEN for the next year. Our organising team is very small (2 people now!) so we'd welcome more help to enable us to run the CEN's regularly and keep in touch with members.

As well as all this, we hope to have our usual:

A day in a life segment- this is your chance to tell us what your role is! We welcome volunteers for this

Networking! We hope to have plenty of time to chat, get to know each other and hear about what's working well, what our service challenges are etc. Please bring your lunch with you (or you can pop into Sheffield city centre). Cakes for our snack table are also very welcomed!!

(please note line up is subject to tweaks. If you have anything you'd like to talk about or share with the group please contact us: sltlaccen@gmail.com)

Description supplied by the event organiser.