Sensory Integration Education

Eleanor McStay-Fearon is a Specialist Speech and Language Therapist at the Middletown Centre For Autism. She shares her reflections as she navigates through the sensory integration modular pathway with Sensory Integration Education and how it has enhanced and changed her practice to date.

I have had an interest in learning more about Sensory Integration for most of my career. After completing my undergraduate degree at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, I worked in a Learning Disability Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service and was introduced to Sensory Integration by the Occupational Therapist on the team. I was fascinated by the functional impact of sensory integration on the children we worked with and the potential for therapy for these issues. In my current role as a paediatric Specialist Speech and Language Therapist at Middletown Centre for Autism, I could see how important addressing the sensory needs of the children we work with is for supporting attention and concentration, learning, social development, regulation and sensorimotor development. Some of my occupational therapy colleagues had completed the PGCert and Masters in sensory integration and I knew I wanted to learn more at the depth that postgraduate study could offer to supplement my practice.

My sensory integration journey started in April 2018, with engagement in the online version of module 1: Foundations and Neuroscience. From there, I have continued to complete modules 2 and 3, achieving the Postgraduate Certificate and SI Practitioner Status in September 2019. I am currently enrolled in module 4: Advanced Practice, using the sensory integration skills I already have gained to further my clinical skills to an advanced level.

Working in the field of ASD for many years, you become very aware of the sensory modulation challenges of the children you support and how these impact on their day to day lives. I have gained a deeper understanding of the underlying neurology which results in the behaviours we see in schools and homes. Developing skills in assessment and intervention to support these challenges has been a key learning area for me.

As a Speech and Language Therapist, I started the course with very little knowledge about the causes and impact of sensorimotor challenges. It has been invaluable to learn about the differences between modulation versus sensory discrimination difficulties, the relation to patterns of SI dysfunction that are so often evident in the clinical population I work with.

Having the opportunity to think about and practice my clinical reasoning skills through the content of the module and engaging in the online forum discussions have greatly enhanced my clinical skills. Engaging in the forum activities and discussion are valuable, from a professional development perspective, and to practice critical thinking and reflection. I benefited from considering the different professional perspectives of those in my forum group, with a mix of knowledge, professional backgrounds (OTs, PTs and fellow SLTs) and clinical backgrounds.

I have an increased awareness for understanding the effect of the clients sensory integration needs on their functioning on a day to day basis, and linking the proximal goals I have as a therapist related to sensory integration function, to distal or functional goals which are meaningful for my clients and their family.

My practice has been enhanced by having increased knowledge and confidence in using the Ayres Sensory Integration (ASI) approach in my peripatetic job role. I see this as both a supplementary tool for therapy and embedded into my understanding and treatment of social communication for my clients. The content of the online modules has been invaluable in allowing me to carry out comprehensive sensory assessment and to enable me to think about how to meet treatment fidelity without having access to a dedicated ASI space for all the clients I work with. The clinical hours component of module 3 allowed me to begin to integrate ASI into my clinical practice by adapting the ASI concepts for use in a school setting, establishing and reviewing a home programme and recommending environmental adaptations to support modulation challenges.

For any Speech and Language therapy colleagues considering embarking on their own sensory integration journey, I really could not recommend the SIE modular pathway enough. Accessing the course content online has been flexible and enabled me to integrate my new learning into my practice concurrently.

There is a requirement to dedicate time to frequent engagement in the course content and forum discussions during each module but, as the topics and activities have an obvious benefit to your professional skills, it does not feel like a chore. You will find that the course content is of immediate value to your daily clinical practice.

There is a clear role for Speech and Language therapists (SLTs) in the assessment and treatment of sensory integration challenges. Auditory processing will be very familiar to most SLTs in professional practice, but we also have emerging research on the links between vestibular functioning and language development and ability, interdependence of motor and social skills in ASD and an emerging evidence base for the development of social skills in ASI interventions, not to mention the importance in regulation for attention, processing of language, and motivation.