Allied Health Partnerships highlights the impact of Sounds-Write for linguistically diverse students
In addition to providing Sounds-Write training to professionals, Allied Health Partnerships has developed a school-based intervention model that combines speech pathology expertise with Sounds-Write. Its speech pathologists provide targeted literacy support for students experiencing significant difficulties with reading and spelling. The schools they work with are often in communities characterised by socioeconomic disadvantage, high levels of language diversity, and limited access to specialist literacy intervention.
Nicole Pham and Hannah Windmill, Speech & Language Pathologists and certified Sounds-Write trainers, talked to us about their work and experiences of using Sounds-Write with students with the highest literacy needs.
Organisation: Allied Health Partnerships
Location: New South Wales, Australia
‘A speech-to-print approach is very helpful for students from language-diverse backgrounds because we all hear sounds, and we all use sounds to make words in our own language.’
Why did you choose Sounds-Write?
We have spent years working in New South Wales primary schools, often in communities facing significant socioeconomic disadvantage and high levels of language diversity. Most of these schools are not currently using Sounds-Write and, in many cases, a high percentage of the students require interventions to close gaps in literacy. The main challenge is determining how to provide intervention efficiently with limited time and resources, and to maximise impact across the entire school population. Our mission is to bridge the gap between speech pathology expertise and classroom literacy instruction, and we can do that very successfully using the Sounds-Write program.
How do you implement Sounds-Write?
In one of the small schools Hannah supports in South Sydney, the challenge is immediately apparent: out of just 100 students, a high percentage are from EALD (English as an Additional Language or Dialect) backgrounds, primarily speaking Arabic at home. Many of these students struggle significantly, with literacy results far below age expectations. Because we are only in these schools one day a week, we’ve had to develop a highly flexible and efficient service delivery model. We mix whole-class lessons, small withdrawal groups, and intensive individual sessions to target as many students as possible.
With 100 students to assess and limited time, you can’t run individual diagnostic tests for everyone, so we use a more time-efficient group screener, delivered as a dictation to the whole group. The results are often sobering, with students in Year 2 or Year 3 scoring very low on the Initial Code; we know that for them, the need for intervention is urgent.
We’ve found that Sounds-Write is uniquely suited to these environments because its speech-to-print approach works particularly well with students from diverse linguistic backgrounds. As Nicole often observes, we look at literacy through a “speechie” lens, connecting oral language development with reading and spelling. The fact that the program is scripted means the routines are consistent and cognitive load is reduced, providing a “step-by-step” success path for children who have previously only known failure.
What does success look like?
One of our most moving experiences involved a Year 3 student taught by Hannah. When we first assessed her, she was only at Unit 5 of the Initial Code. The social impact was devastating; she was aware she was “with the little kids” and would often arrive at sessions saying, “I don’t want to be here. I can’t do it anyway”. Hannah made the deliberate choice to provide 1:1 support and actually dropped back a unit initially just to give this student a taste of success.
Slowly, the shift happened. As her decoding skills grew, so did her bravery. She began choosing harder decodable books and, eventually, she looked at Hannah and said, “I can read now”. Over five months of weekly sessions, she moved from Unit 4 all the way to being ready for the Extended Code.
What challenges do you face?
This work isn’t done in isolation. Collaboration is our key ingredient. We often work alongside School Learning Support Officers (SLSOs) who may not be trained in Sounds-Write. We treat this partnership much like working with a parent: we model the lessons, provide the resources, and conduct weekly handovers to ensure students get practice between our visits.
We do face constant hurdles such as staffing shortages, attendance issues, and the heartbreak of only having 30 minutes of intervention per week for students who need so much more. Our ideal scenario would be to have funding for speech pathology support five days a week and for every member of staff in the school to be Sounds-Write trained so that eventually, most students would not need us!
Despite these constraints, the progress we see is transformative. It is not just reading; it is giving children the self-belief that they are learners. By combining targeted instruction with a deep understanding of a student’s language needs, we aren’t just teaching them to read and spell—we are changing their entire trajectory in school.