About Afasic

 

Across the UK there are more than one million children and young adults with a speech and language impairment.

 

Afasic is the UK charity representing children and young adults with speech, language and communication impairments, working for their inclusion in society and supporting their parents and carers.

 

Afasic is a parent-led organisation that was established in 1968. It operates a UK wide helpline and provides literature and information to parents and professionals.

 

It has a team of field workers across the UK which is instrumental in building up local groups, developing services, reflecting local needs, developing relationships with statutory agencies, providing training and promoting the issues Afasic is concerned with.

 

Afasic is a membership organisation, publishing a member’s newsletter three times a year and a professional broadsheet twice a year as well as organising training workshops and conferences.

 

It works in partnership with other voluntary organisations and is represented on various government working parties. 

 

Recent projects include:

 

• Afasic Youth project: a groundbreaking provision for young people aged 11-18 with a speech and language impairment in North East London.
• A leaflet on claiming benefits for children with speech & language impairments, which was sent free to all Afasic members.
• A new “training the trainers” programme in partnership with the British Dyslexia Association and University College London on language and literacy in the early years.
• A range of resources on speech and language impairments that has been distributed to every primary and secondary school in Scotland.
• Training workshops across the UK offering more than 3,500 training opportunities in the last 12 months.

A successful project in Tower Hamlets for pre-school children from the Bangladeshi community to help develop language through the use of special bags of toys.

Our history

Afasic was established in 1968 by Margaret Greene (a speech and language therapist) as an organisation to provide support for parents of children with speech and language impairments and to awaken society to the existence of this group of hidden and neglected children.

 

Since then Afasic has helped more than 175,000 people affected by this disability in some way. Respected research suggests six in 100 children will at some stage have a speech, language or communication difficulty.

 

That’s over a million children and young people in the UK.

 

Afasic remains a parent-led organisation that seeks to raise awareness of the needs of these children, support their parents and carers, and work for their inclusion in society.