Congratulations Holly

Congratulations to Holly McAlister who has had these papers published for her PhD while I have been on leave:

McAlister, H., McLeod, S., & Hopf, S. C. (2026). Ladders, trees and matrixes: Child-focused participatory action research frameworks for children with diverse communication abilities. Child Language Teaching and Therapy. https://doi.org/10.1177/02656590261455298 

McAlister, H., Hopf, S. C., & McLeod, S. (2026). Mountain garden views: Speech-language pathologists’ beliefs, practices and aspirations for culturally responsive practice with Pacific Islander children and families. Speech, Language and Hearing, 29(1), 2671099. https://doi.org/10.1080/2050571X.2026.2671099
 

CeTasSSD catchup

While I was away the CeTasSSD team finalised the data collection. There are 1207 students in kindergarten across the state and were were able to assess 880 students. Most of the students we were unable to assess did not have consent forms returned. We are very pleased with this number. We are now analysing the data so that we can create a bespoke speech screening pathway for the state.

Felicity, Sharynne  and Lisa

The latest registrations for CVC2026

The latest registrations for CVC2026 are: 548 registrants across 40 countries. Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Great Britain, Greece, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam. 

We have received 174 abstracts from 36 countries. Our scientific review committee is currently reviewing the papers so that only high quality papers are accepted for presentation at the conference. 

Welcome back to CVC

Today was my first day back at work (yesterday was a public holiday). My Children's Voices Centre team has been fantastic. They have been so productive while I have been away. Thank you to A/Prof Kathy Cologon who was the acting director of CVC while I was away and Dr Helen Blake who answered many of my research emails. I also had a kangaroo hop across the lawn outside of my office and some gorgeous birds come to say hello. It is nice to be back.

CVC children's advisory group present at the WHO Disability Health Equity Network side event at COSP19

This week the Children's Voices Centre Children's Advisory group are presenting at the United Nations in New York! They have prepared a 7 minute video to be played during the official United Nations side event. Kathy Cologon has worked with nine children associated with CVC to prepare the video. Wow!

The CVC Children's Advisory Group who presented were: Finbar, Zac, Chloe, Knox, Jocelyn, Greta, Nayantara, Biju facilitated by A/Prof Kathy Cologon, Dr Belinda Downey, Dr Shukla Sikder, and Dr Goutam Roy

Here are the details: 

World Health Organization (WHO) Disability Health Equity Network (DHEN) Side Event at the 19th Conference of States Parties (COSP19) to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability in New York City

Title: Rights to Results: Political Prioritization of Disability Health Equity 20 Years After the CRPD
Time: Wednesday, June 10 ∙ 11:30 am  - 12:45 pm EDT
Location: Bahá'í International Community, 866 United Nations Plaza, Suite 120, New York, NY 10017
Co-sponsors:
•    WHO Disability Health Equity Network (DHEN)
•    International Disability and Development Consortium (IDDC)
•    Deaf Child Worldwide
•    International Cerebral Palsy Society (ICPS)
•    Rehabilitation International (RI)

Here is the run sheet for the UN side event

11:30 – 11:35    Opening        Christoph Gutenbrunner
11:35 – 11:45    Welcome Addresses       
•    Rehabilitation International President: Christoph Gutenbrunner
•    WHO: Kaloyan Kamenov 
•    Deaf Child Worldwide and IDDC: Elizabeth Sidell
•    ICPS: John Coughlan 
11:45 – 11:50    Introduction of the speakers    Christoph Gutenbrunner    
•    Janet Charchuk, Board Member of Down Syndrome International
•    Rafael Bonfin, Co-founder of Noussa Casa Institute (International Cerebral Palsy Society)
•    Dr. Latoya Dixon, Post-Doctoral Student/Lamar University, Disability Advocate & Critic of the ADA
•    Danielle Engel, Programme Specialist, SRHR Across Life Course, UNFPA
11:50 – 11:57    Video Children’s Voices Centre Advisory Group of Charles Sturt University, Australia
11:57-12:07    Panelist statements
12:07 – 12:32    Panel discussion
12:32 – 12:42    Open discussion with the audience
12:42 – 12:45     Wrap up and closure

 

Universities

While I was on leave I had the opportunity to visit the campuses of a few universities around the world. I did not visit in an official capacity - so had a lovely time just exploring the campuses of ancient and modern universities in cities including:

• Fes and Marrakesh in Morocco 
• Coimbra, Aveiro and Braga in Portugal

I particularly enjoyed the tour of the UNESCO heritage listed university in Coimbra and chatting to the students about the customs and traditions. 

Chatting with students at the University of Coimbra about traditions when students transitioned from first to second year

 

On leave

Thanks to Kathy, Tamara, Helen, Emma and Carolyn who are holding the fort while I am on long service leave (a unique Australian legislated employment entitlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_service_leave) 

Oxford Handbook page proofs - round 2

Over the past week Helen Blake and I have been reviewing the second round of page proofs for The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World. It is a very complex book filled with phonetic symbols and many orthographies from across the world. It is also a book that I have standardised with every chapter presented in exactly the same way so that people can compare one language and dialect with another. The book has been written by 173 authors speaking 75 languages and dialects. These factors make the typesetting phase very complicated. We are nearly there...

I am so proud of this amazing book - I can't wait until it is published in June so that the world can share the contents.

Here is the link to the book: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-speech-development-in-languages-of-the-world-9780192868862 

Here is the view out of my window across the autumn leaves as I finalise the page proofs:

Here is a paper that Helen and I wrote about the work we have been doing to support multilingual children's speech: 

McLeod, S., & Blake, H. L. (2026). Global knowledge in 131 languages and dialects about children’s speech development, assessment, and intervention. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2026.2635344 
 

 

CeTasSSD Speech Census wrap up

This week our CeTasSSD Speech Census team met to celebrate meeting so many wonderful 4- to 5-year-olds during our research. We also reflected on what went well and what can be changed in the future.

Here are our statistics so far:  

• 1207 Kinder students in the state
• 981 consent forms returned (226 not returned)
• 945 consent forms provided consent (36 did not provide consent)
• 874 assessments attempted (45+ more not yet entered into the spreadsheet)
• 14 children did not give assent and 8 could not be assessed (e.g., due to disability)
• 859 (+45) children have completed the International Speech Screener (ISS)

Thanks so much to the children and schools (especially the SSCs and TAs). Thanks to our wonderful CeTasSSD research team. Hooray team!

Helen Blake, Sharynne McLeod, Felicity Laurence, Emma Scanlon, Ally Barrett met for 2 hours to debrief, summarise, and plan

Team members not pictured: Sarah Verdon, Kate Crowe, Lisa Johnson 

CVC2026 update

Today's CVC2026 conference update:

• 302 registrations from 33 countries
• 32 abstracts submitted so far - closing 11 May 2026 

Registrants' countries:  Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Fiji, Greece, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States

CVC's Finance Business Partner visits The Treehouse

Today Gil Burmeister, the Finance Business Partner for CVC visited The Treehouse and provided extremely useful advice and updates for Emma Hayes (our new Senior Administration Officer) and myself. Thanks Gil.

LSHSS special issue on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)

Today Helen Blake, Kathy Cologon and I met to check the status of the 23 manuscripts in our clinical forum: Children’s communication and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Nine manuscripts have been accepted or will be accepted soon. The remainder are under review with the reviewers or editors, or have been rejected.

It is going to be a landmark special issue with diverse and thought provoking content. 

Children Draw Health analysis planning

Children Draw Health analysis planning was led by Dr Helen L. Blake and Dr Carolyn Gregoric today. We will be analysing the children's drawings using the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF) and the Global Report on Health Equity for Persons with Disabilities

https://www.who.int/teams/noncommunicable-diseases/sensory-functions-disability-and-rehabilitation/global-report-on-health-equity-for-persons-with-disabilities 

Sharynne, Tamara, Helen, Lysa, Belinda, Carolyn, Kathy

 

Visitors from Sri Lanka

It was wonderful to welcome visitors from Sri Lanka to The Treehouse this week: Ms Yasaara Kaluaratchi (Co-founder and Director of Academics of Prospects College of Higher Education), and Mr Somesh Perera (Founder and Chairman of Prospects Education). They were hosted by Trent Pohlmann (Head, International Partnership Development, Charles Sturt University).

Here is information about their relationship with CSU: https://news.csu.edu.au/latest-news/charles-sturts-international-expansion-to-underpin-regional-education-and-research-commitment2 

Sharynne  McLeod, Mr Somesh Perera, Ms Yasaara Kaluaratchi, Trent Pohlmann, Tamara Cumming

Grants submitted

Congratulations to A/Prof Kathy Cologon who has submitted two grants on behalf of the Children's Voices Centre. They are good grants - we hope they are successful.

 

Ladders, trees and matrixes: Child-focused participatory action research frameworks for children with diverse communication abilities

Congratulations to our PhD student Holly McAlister who has just had the following article accepted for publication:

McAlister, H., McLeod, S., & Hopf, S. C. (2026, in press April). Ladders, trees and matrixes: Child-focused participatory action research frameworks for children with diverse communication abilities. Child Language Teaching and Therapy. 

Here is the abstract:

Several frameworks – including Hart’s Ladder of Participation (1992), Shier’s Models for Participation (2001, 2010, 2019), and the Lundy Model (2007) – have been developed to support children’s genuine participation as researchers. These child-focused participatory action research (C-PAR) frameworks claim to increase children’s capacity to share their thoughts and opinions to change their lives and communities. This narrative review involved systematic database searches to identify application of these key C-PAR frameworks, and the extent of child participation by children with diverse communication abilities, particularly within the field of speech and language therapy research. Thirty-three papers were identified for descriptive analysis. Children included in these studies were aged between 2-18 years. Children were from Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Jamaica, the Republic of Ireland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Most studies included children with speech, language, and communication needs (n = 32, 96.99%) and one paper (3.03%) included children with a swallowing disorder. Most studies (n = 26, 78.79%) consulted children at the data collection stage, often using visual supports, but fewer papers also involved children at other stages of the research process (n = 7, 21.21%). Of these 33 papers, only 4 (12.12%) directly applied one of the C-PAR frameworks. Within speech and language therapy research, we can mature in our practice of involving children with diverse communication needs in all stages of a research project, to support their genuine participation as researchers.

Launch of Phon 4

Congratulations to Yvan Rose and Greg Hedlund and team who launched Phon 4 today (their Thursday 16th April - our Friday 17th April).

https://www.phon.ca/phon-manual/getting_started.html 

Our CeTasSSD team were very honoured to work with Yvan to install and begin using Phon 4 on its first day of release. Yvan has been very generous preparing our speech sample and teaching us how to use it effectively to analyse the data we have collected from our Tasmanian Speech Census.

Helen, Sharynne, Emma, Felicity, Yvan, Ally - meeting #2

Yvan, Emma, Helen, Felicity, Sharynne  - meeting #1

A colourful time of year

It is autumn (fall) at The Treehouse. This evening a king parrot was looking stunning amongst the autumn leaves.

A few days later outside my window...

Sharynne, Tamara, Emma with the CSU elm trees

Poplar trees are gorgeous across the Central West at this time of year

CVC community bimonthly meeting - 16 April 2026

 Today was our CVC community bimonthly meeting. What a celebration of accomplishments and our meaningful and authentic plans for 2026-2027.

Children draw health: Planning data analysis

This afternoon Carolyn, Helen and I continued making plans for the analysis of the Children Draw Health data based on our discussion at the WHO meeting last week to focus on the World Report on Disability (factors contributing to health inequities). We have 10 CVC affiliates with ethics approval to undertake the analysis with us when we are ready.