Blog

2019…yet another reflective blog!

December 2018 marked the 12 month anniversary of me selling my company and was the beginning of my 2 months sick leave (my first ever episode of sickness in my whole career). It’s safe to say that 12 months ago tomorrow I was at an all time low and knew that A LOT had...

read more

Who is your daddy and what does he do?

Having spent almost a decade with my previous company my name and “the brand” are pretty much synonymous. I get a lot of questions from people I meet as to who now work for / with and why this changed this year so here goes with the simplest explanation... In...

read more

How do I work?

Ever since my days in the NHS I, like many others, have gone above and beyond for the children I work with and their families. When you have a huge caseload quite simply this is impossible as, even with absolute flexibility, there are a finite number of hours in each...

read more

Recommending Direct Speech Therapy

When I was a junior SLT in the NHS I was always given the "tribunal families" i.e. the families that had spent an arm and a leg on independent reports and legal fees in order to access the appropriate placement (school) and therapy provision (SLT / OT / PT) for their...

read more

The Chris Wade Award for Clinical Innovation

To show my gratitude to the university where I trained to be a Speech & Language Therapist (Leeds Met, Leeds Beckett) each year the SLT department and I run a Clinical Innovation Award.  The 'criteria' we came up with were that the winning project will:  demonstrate a...

read more

SLT approaches – Intensive Interaction

When a child is typically developing by the age of 3 they will be using 3-4+ word sentences to make requests; comment on interesting things they see; ask & answer questions and direct those around them.  In direct contrast the nonverbal child with Autism at 3 years...

read more

Speech Therapy Assessments & Autism: Observation

Special Educational Needs Tribunal assessments of Education Healthcare Plan (EHCP) Tribunal assessments For the past 12 years I have been privileged to work for the NHS; Charities; Local Authorities and as a private speech & language therapist specialising in Autism. ...

read more

Nonverbal Autism: What’s my approach?

I often get asked by parents what my approach is for children with Autism that do not communicate verbally and whilst there's most certainly not a 'one size fits all' approach I do have some particular approaches I embed into my SLT programmes.  In upcoming posts I'll...

read more

Who even am?!

I'm Chris and I'm daddy to Izzy (6); Tom (4); Osian (1) and husband to Nia. We're expecting our fourth (yes we're mad!) baby in January 2020 and so you could certainly say there isn't a quiet second in our house!! Nia and I co-own Wade Therapy Services under which...

read more