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School Services
DWSP provides a school-based service to schools across the Melbourne Metropolitan region. Our clinicians attend your school and provide therapy sessions with children in their school environment.
By working in collaboration with the child’s school-based support the clinicians are able to not only provide therapy but also provide advice on curriculum and classroom planning for children with specific needs.
Our clinicians can come out and provide:
- Funding assessments (eg, NDIS, NDIA)
- School entry screenings: short assessments suitable for kindergarten and prep age groups to provide support for school preparation and school year planning.
Assessments
Intervention
We provide clinicians with both Speech Pathology and Occupational Therapy training to assist children with:
- Speech clarity and language development
- Grammar and narrative
- Literacy and reading skills
- Stuttering or voice quality
- Listening, auditory processing or hearing loss management
- Autism spectrum disorders
- Handwriting
- Fine and gross motor skills
- Attention and organisation
- Social skills and making friends
Writing programs and providing tools for teachers to use to ‘carry-over’ therapy into the classroom.
We enjoy working in a “push-in” model where we support students to use their skills within their classroom. Our role may include writing programs and providing tools for teachers to use to ‘carry-over’ therapy into the classroom for students on our caseload.
When working in schools we offer a range of teacher materials, referral checklists and processes and support school staff to embed these student checks into their referral pathways for student support.
Program and Material Development
Aide Training
We can provide training to Aides so that they may support children in the classroom setting. We can also offer specifically designed programs for aides to target therapy goals for students needing 1:1 input.
For schools that don’t have Aides available, we can supply our own Allied Health Assistant (AHA). Using an AHA is a cost-effective way to deliver a therapy program, and is an easy way to arrange weekly or twice weekly sessions to work on student goals. Our clinicians design the program and trains the AHA and then reviews the program each term.
Delivering therapy in this way means students can have an intensive weekly therapy program provided at school or kindergarten. This in turn means a therapy budget can offer 2-3x more sessions using an AHA and a therapist, rather than just using a therapist alone.
- Professional development opportunities for teachers
- Information sessions for parents
- Range of topics including school readiness, early literacy development
- Topics can be selected by teaching teams or schools, or also suggested by therapists in your team based on current students on the caseload
Parent/Teacher Education Sessions
We aim to work with schools and families to create realistic funding options for children to access speech pathology and occupational therapy. When setting up programs in schools, we work closely with each school to develop an individual service model that matches their funding. We can also arrange school, parent or “split” billing to take advantage of rebates, government funding, or Private Health cover.