Speech and Language Therapy for children with Down’s Syndrome

If your child has Down’s Syndrome and would benefit from support with speech, language or communication, speech and language therapy can help identify what they are ready to work on next. All Join In provides speech and language therapy for children with Down’s Syndrome in Bristol and the surrounding areas, with support available at home, school or nursery.

Children’s speech and language therapy has a vital role to play in helping children with Down’s Syndrome develop their language to its full potential. Children’s speech therapy should be tailored to the specific learning profile commonly associated with those with Down’s Syndrome but also keep the individual child at the heart of planning and decisions.

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Speech And Language Therapy For Children With Down’s Syndrome In Bristol

Children with Down’s Syndrome may benefit from speech and language therapy at different stages of their development. Some children may need support with speech delay or language delay, while others may be working on clearer speech, building longer sentences, asking questions, understanding new words or using language with friends and adults.

All Join In provides children’s speech and language therapy in Bristol and the surrounding areas for children with Down’s Syndrome. Therapy is planned around the individual child, their strengths, interests and current priorities, while also taking into account the learning profile commonly associated with Down’s Syndrome.

Support may focus on speech sounds, vocabulary, sentence building, understanding language, social communication, conversation skills or confidence in everyday communication. Some children may also benefit from visual support, signing or other strategies to help them understand and use language more successfully.

Sessions can take place at home, school or nursery, depending on what works best for your child and family. All Join In can also work with education staff where helpful, so speech and language targets can be supported in everyday routines and familiar settings.

  • Just like any other child, your child is unique. Speech and language therapy can help identify and target specific areas that your child would benefit from developing at that time, such as clearer speech, conversations with friends or building sentences to get their message across. Speech and language therapy can be delivered for a shorter period of time for one agreed area, or working on lots of different things over a longer time frame.

  • Yes, All Join In Speech and Language Therapy owner Anna Chimenti has completed training with both Down Syndrome Education Internation and Down Syndrome UK. She also accesses specialist supervision and currently has a small caseload of children with Down’s Syndrome locally, all of whom are working on different things based on their own specific needs and priorities. Associate therapist Eleanor Jones also has a special interest in working with children with Down’s Syndrome.

  • Anna first starting working with E in February 2025. She sees him weekly in school with his fantastic 1:1 and has also done some sessions at home in the school holidays with his family. E uses lots of spoken language and is working on building longer sentences with the connecting word “and”, using tricky sounds like “sh” to say important words (like “station” as trains are his favourite!) and asking questions to find out things he wants to know. E’s love of trains makes all our therapy sessions fun – we have made long train tracks to think about the concept word “long”, we have driven trains to the “station” or the “shop” to practice “sh” words and we have made a special picture book to practice asking “What is Emily doing?” and “What is Thomas doing?”.