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.
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!
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
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:
I particularly enjoyed the tour of the UNESCO heritage listed university in Coimbra and chatting to the students about the customs and traditions.
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| Chatting with students at the University of Coimbra about traditions when students transitioned from first to second year |
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)
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
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:
Thanks so much to the children and schools (especially the SSCs and TAs). Thanks to our wonderful CeTasSSD research team. Hooray team!
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| Helen Blake, Sharynne McLeod, Felicity Laurence, Emma Scanlon, Ally Barrett met for 2 hours to debrief, summarise, and plan |
Today's CVC2026 conference update:
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
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.
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 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
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| Sharynne, Tamara, Helen, Lysa, Belinda, Carolyn, Kathy |
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
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| Sharynne McLeod, Mr Somesh Perera, Ms Yasaara Kaluaratchi, Trent Pohlmann, Tamara Cumming |
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.
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.
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.
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| Helen, Sharynne, Emma, Felicity, Yvan, Ally - meeting #2 |
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| Yvan, Emma, Helen, Felicity, Sharynne - meeting #1 |
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...
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| Sharynne, Tamara, Emma with the CSU elm trees |
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| Poplar trees are gorgeous across the Central West at this time of year |
Today was our CVC community bimonthly meeting. What a celebration of accomplishments and our meaningful and authentic plans for 2026-2027.
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.
We are working hard to finalise our CET speech census this week before the children all go on school holidays. We have just over 1000 consent forms returned. I have entered data for 733 assessments - but our team has done more than this (yay team!). I entered the data Ally gave me this afternoon for another 46 assessments. Helen did over 30 today (I haven't entered these yet). What an amazing team - and incredible children and teaching staff.
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| Ally and Sharynne heading to The Nest in The Treehouse for more data collection with the children |
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| Sharynne, Ally Barrett and Emma Scanlon at the end of a big day assessing wonderful children |
The Children's Voices Centre has been profiled on the Charles Sturt University Office of Engagement and Enterprise: https://www.csu.edu.au/office/engagement-enterprise/community/programs-and-initiatives/initiatives/childrens-voices-centre
This morning our CVC team met to continue planning CVC2026. We were so pleased to see that we have received 286 registrations and over 20 abstracts from the following countries (these abstracts will now be considered by our Scientific Review Committee): Australia, China, Ireland, Israel, Nepal, New Zealand
Nigeria, Poland, United Kingdom, United States.
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| Scientific review committee meeting (16th April 2026) |