Yorkshire centre that changes lives by helping stammerers to find their voice

Stammering can affect as many as one in a hundred people. Chris Bond visited the Stammering Support Centre in Leeds to find out more.
Jen Flinton with her son Jamie, and Musharaf Asgar, below.Jen Flinton with her son Jamie, and Musharaf Asgar, below.
Jen Flinton with her son Jamie, and Musharaf Asgar, below.

WATCHING little Jamie Flinton playing games with his older brother Archie he looks just like any carefree seven-year-old.

In most ways he is. He’s bright, energetic and inquisitive, but he has also struggled with stammering and what he calls his “bumpy” words.

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Stammering affects around 600,000 adults in the UK and it’s been back in the spotlight following the final episode of the hit TV series Educating Yorkshire, featuring the inspirational Musharaf Asghar.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house (or in living rooms up and down the land) when “Mushy”, whose stammer had left him almost unable to talk, stood up and gave a speech thanking his fellow pupils and teachers for all their help.

As well as being pure TV gold it’s got people talking about what can be a debilitating condition and has been hailed by the British Stammering Association (BSA) for helping raise awareness about an issue that all too often is overlooked.

Stammering can affect as many as one in eight pre-school children and Jamie is one of around 300 referrals seen by the Stammering Support Centre in Leeds each year. The centre, one of only two of its kind in the whole country, helps people not only from Leeds but right across the region.

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Dr Trudy Stewart, consultant speech and language therapist at the centre, says the final Educating Yorkshire episode has had a massive impact. “If you look at the British Stammering Association Facebook page the number of hits they’ve had after the programme is just phenomenal.”

She and her team of speech therapists work with children as young as three, right up to pensioners in their 70s.

“Sometimes you can acquire stammering later in life through neurological disorders like Parkinson’s, so sometimes we get more elderly clientele. But we see people of all ages.”

There are different types of stammering and it affects people in different ways, so some people repeat words several times while others get stuck completely. But Dr Stewart says by identifying the problem and giving people techniques to help them it can be overcome.

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“We had a lad who went on one of our residential courses last year. We’ll call him ‘H’ and he started off saying ‘I’m never going to get a job, I won’t have a girlfriend, I’m going to be rubbish.’ But by the end of the week he stood up in front of the whole group and said ‘I don’t have to be held back by this and I can do these things.’ It was inspirational to see him make that level of change and of course we were all tears.”

The centre – opened two years ago by the Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, who himself has a stammer – has an annual budget of £250,000 and is funded by NHS commissioners in Leeds and Yorkshire, along with support from the national charity Action for Stammering in Children. This allows it to carry out important work but Dr Stewart admits that attracting funding can be difficult.

“Around five per cent of children and one per cent of adults stammer, but it’s not as high as something like heart disease or stroke. So in terms of funding it is often a struggle and you do sometimes feel that you’re bottom of the pile.”

Nevertheless there’s a real need for the kind of specialist therapy they provide. “Very often people go to their GP and the doctor’s not sure where the specialist services are so we’re trying to get the message out that they can come here.”

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Dr Stewart also wants to see more centres like the one in Leeds. “It’s hard when you’re working full time, or if you have a family, to travel an hour-and-a-half from somewhere like Hull. So yes, there need to be more centres like ours which deal with complex and severe cases because at the moment there’s only us and the centre in London.”

She thinks that stammering still isn’t fully understood. “I think there’s been greater awareness since The King’s Speech, because that portrayal of the king’s stammer gave people a real insight into what it actually feels like and the impact it can have.

“But I don’t think people realise how much people’s lives are compromised by it, starting from the young lad at school who doesn’t put his hand up to answer the question so the teacher never knows that he’s actually very bright. He then chooses particular GCSEs like computer studies or business studies because they might be less verbal and because of that he can’t actually go for the career that potentially he could achieve a lot in.”

It can ruin relationships, too. “I had a guy in who chose to not tell the woman he loved that he loved her because he was worried that if they lived together she would find out he had a stammer,” she says. “Some people avoid putting themselves in certain situations because they know they’ll stammer and they want to hide it because for them it’s shameful and unacceptable.”

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Despite our growing awareness of disability in general she feels there’s still an intolerance towards stammering. “We’re very good when it comes to wheelchairs and deafness and blindness, so why aren’t we tolerant of stammering, why is it still the butt of jokes?”

She says it’s important to help young lads like Jamie when they’re young. “From what we know about stammering we can differentiate quite early on between those children who are likely to persist and those who are more likely to recover. Children who are more likely to persist have more iterations so they might go bbbbbb-all, rather than bb-all. But if we get them in early we can do this analysis and look at the risk factors because if there’s a family history they’re more likely to persist.”

They see people for as long as they need support in managing their stammer, which can take months, or sometimes years.

Jennifer Flinton, from Bramhope, Leeds, first brought her son Jamie to the centre last December after he suddenly started developing a stammer at the start of his second year at school. “He started stammering on his first week and by October it was pretty bad,” she says.

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Children can be quite cruel at times but Jennifer says adults, too, can sometimes make things worse. “Because it came on very suddenly and he’d be having maybe having six iterations he’d struggle to get a word out and some adults and people we know would say ‘spit it out’ which didn’t help at all.”

Jamie started having one-to-one therapy lessons in March. “It’s been brilliant and Jamie’s felt quite special coming here. Joanna (his therapist) was able to articulate to him why sometimes his words get stuck and what to do when this happened.”

As well as building up his confidence the therapist visited his school to see how he was taught and give them feedback about ways they could help.

“They do a lot of things like standing up in assemblies and getting the children to speak and really you should never put a child with a stammer in that position where they feel they have to speak, so it was little things like that and being aware,” she explains.

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“There have been things that have been good for me to learn and Jamie’s school because we’re not experts and we need the help.”

She says in just over six months Jamie’s stammering has all but gone. “All those things really helped and at the moment he’s not really stammering. He’s got a little bit of hesitation and that’s very much down to the support we’ve been given here.”

When he first started having problems with his speech he was picked on by some of the other children, but now his classmates are aware of his stammer and the teasing has stopped.

Jamie says he likes coming to the centre because “the people are nice” and that Joanna has helped him.

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“She told me to think of a slow animal to help me slow down so I’m not talking too fast and I chose an elephant and she said ‘how about you have an elephant in your pocket, so when you hit some bumpy words you can just remember the elephant which is slow’ and that reminds me to speak slowly.”

And how are his “bumpy words” now? “Much better,” he says, with a smile that fills the room.

Stammering uncovered

According to the British Stammering Association (BSA) around one per cent of the UK population, including 600,000 adults, are affected by stammering.

It’s believed that it affects one in eight pre-school children and up to a quarter of these are at risk of developing chronic stammering which may persist into adulthood, without intervention during the pre-school years.

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Children who stammer are just as likely to be gifted and talented as those who don’t.

Stammering does sometimes run in families.

There is growing research looking at brain activity in young people and many experts believe the cause of stammering is physiologically connected with brain development.

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