Speech pathology
for primary-school
age kids.
Late-diagnosed kids, masking kids, after-school-meltdown kids, AAC users at school, kids whose school report doesn't match the kid you live with.
The school-age caseload
By the time a kid is in primary school the questions get specific. They might be managing at school but melting down for hours after pickup. They might be reading three years ahead of grade level and unable to write a sentence. They might be scripting most of their language and going unidentified because the teacher hears the words. They might be a confident AAC user at home and never use it at school because nobody's modelling on it there. Or they might have just been diagnosed at 9 and the family is processing what the last 4 years of "regular" speech therapy actually meant for them.
Speech Sprout works with all of these. Sessions are usually 45 minutes, in-clinic at Burleigh Heads or via telehealth, with a healthy dose of parent coaching alongside the direct work with the kid.
What we work on at this age
- Self-advocacy phrases that fit your kid. Not scripted social skills — sentences they can actually use to ask for what they need (a sensory break, a different worksheet, the bathroom, a quiet corner).
- The gap between "school says fine" and home. Mapping the masking load, building school strategies that lower it, communicating with the school in their language while keeping the kid centred.
- Higher-level language — inferencing, narrative structure, conversation repair, comprehension of academic language. Done through their interests, not workbooks.
- AAC at school — extending modelling beyond home, training the teacher and SLSO, building a communication passport that travels with the kid.
- Late-diagnosis processing — supporting kids (and parents) who are making sense of a recent identification.
- Gestalt language work at later stages — mitigation, recombination, grammar emerging from broken-down chunks. See our GLP guide.
What we won't do
No scripted social skills programs that teach masking. No friendship "training" that assumes neurotypical social norms are the destination. No goals built around making your kid sit still, make eye contact, or stop fidgeting. We work on communication and self-advocacy; we don't perform behaviour modification.
Working with schools
We work with Gold Coast schools across the public, Catholic, and independent systems — and with schools across Australia via telehealth + teacher liaison. The work usually includes classroom observations (in person or via Zoom), teacher and SLSO consults, IEP/ILP/EAP meeting attendance, and written advocacy. We translate between clinical language and education language so the school gets something they can actually use. More on this in school & NDIS support.
NDIS
We are NDIS-registered and work with self-managed, plan-managed and agency-managed plans. Speech pathology for school-age kids sits under Capacity Building (Improved Daily Living) and the work usually includes reports timed to the plan review. See how NDIS works at Speech Sprout.
Starting
A free 15-minute call is the right next step. On the call we'll listen, ask a few specific questions about what's actually happening (not just the diagnosis), and tell you whether speech pathology is the right place to start or whether you'd benefit more from a different specialist first.