Speech therapy wounds

(And I really mean that).

Met my friend from speech therapy over the weekend. Five months after leaving the course we are still licking our wounds. There’s a real sense of grievance, of injustice, over the way the university dealt with us. Granted, I wasn’t the most stellar student, but my friend – she’s bloody good. She already has a paper published from her first degree and aced most of her speech therapy courses while we were there. Neither of us felt there was any support from the tutors whilst we were battling through the 25 exams in 23 weeks of teaching, the team projects, the horrible confidence-shattering placements – but we tried to carry on. When we both finally broke, the university’s attitude was something akin to “See ya!” and that was that. Never mind that 14% of the course left at the end of the first year – an attrition rate of which any university should be ashamed. Have they investigated the reasons for this? Nope.

The sad thing is that the already beleaguered NHS pays for this training – and bursaries to support us while we’re studying. 14% of the students on my course = something like 20 students x tuition fees @ £3k /yr + bursary = a bit of a waste of money. Medical schools, precisely for this reason, are keen to reduce attrition rates to negligible levels – but in our SLT training, nobody seems to care.

On the plus side, at least for me and my friends who left, a study by the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists reports that 80% of this year’s SLT graduates are unemployed. So perhaps we did the right thing after all.