The Michael Palin Centre for Stammering

18/12/2025

• Do you want to make space to reflect on clinical supervision?
• Do you supervise students or other staff members?
• Are you planning to start supervising others, or do you want to enhance what you offer already?
• Do you want/need to build your knowledge, confidence and skills in clinical supervision?

Join Ali Berquez for an introduction to Clinical Supervision for Allied Health Professionals, including Speech & Language Therapists. Several models, styles and techniques will be introduced, drawing from a range of psychological approaches, so that participants can include a variety of styles, techniques, and questions in the clinical supervision they offer.

An experiential and interactive course, with opportunities for discussion, practical activities, skill development and reflection.

Your trainer, Ali Berquez has a broad experience of clinical supervision including group Personal Construct Psychology supervision (with a mix of professionals); group Cognitive Behaviour Therapy supervision at the Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre (with psychologists, psychiatrists and counselling psychologists); peer group supervision at Place2Be (with qualified counsellors), individual clinical supervision with a Family Therapist, and group and individual supervision at the Michael Palin Centre (with stammering specialist SLTs).

13/12/2025

✨ What an incredible few days for the MPC Team at ASHA 2025! ✨

We’re heading home inspired and grateful for an amazing week of learning, sharing and connecting.

🏆 Huge congratulations to Elaine Kelman, Head of Centre, on receiving an ASHA Fellowship. A well-deserved honour recognizing her outstanding contributions to the field of stuttering. We could not be more proud!

🎤 Ali Berquez, Clinical Lead, and Martha Jeffery, Highly Specialist SLT, delivered an invited workshop on Solution Focused Brief Therapy, sparking thoughtful discussions and connecting with so many motivated clinicians.

🗣️ Sarah Delpeche, Deputy Head of Centre, presented a session on working with emotions in school-age children who stutter, selected as one of ASHA’s Centennial Workshops - a fantastic achievement!

📚 Martha and Sarah also had a great time helping at the Stuttering Foundation booth, meeting enthusiastic therapists and sharing resources and ideas.

🤝 And of course, we loved catching up with friends, old and new!

13/12/2025

Congratulations to MPC’s Sarah Caughter for her RCSLT conference award!

Sarah presented preliminary research findings of the study ‘Learning from people with lived experience of cluttering: what people who clutter want from therapy’, carried out by Sarah and colleagues Sarah Delpeche and Sophie Card.

Sarah explains, “The results highlighted the need for broad, holistic and individualised therapy for people who clutter, incorporating their communication environment, cognitive and emotional needs, self-identity and acceptance and speech techniques. This is an exciting addition to cluttering therapy research, guided by those with lived experience of cluttering.”

The study sought to explore the views of children and adults who clutter, as well as parents of children who clutter. The qualitative study explored their best hopes from therapy using Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) scaling.

Sarah was one of the winners for highest scoring abstracts by early career researchers.

Congratulations to all the winners and thank you to the RCSLT for hosting the conference.

09/12/2025

Palin PCI in Spanish; Get booked for 2026 -

Gemma works with children who stammer and their parents, and with adults who stammer. Before working at the Michael Palin Centre she worked in a specialist language unit developing her skills in working with children with a range of language needs including children who stammer.

09/12/2025

What an amazing night of MPC community!
Our first talent show expertly hosted by a team of teens with fantastic children sharing their lego, Rubiks cube, dance, gymnastics, animation, football, poetry and singing talents! Even Michael Palin was caught practising his times tables!
Everyone was so impressed by their confidence, creativity and supportive cheering.

Thank you to our wonderful MPC community of Friends and therapists Nikki and Hope. We can't wait for the next one!

29/11/2025

**Palin PCI**
4 y 25 de enero 2026
**Visita la página web de MPC para reservar

** michaelpalincentreforstammering.org/tc-events/
** mpc.training@nhs.net

25/11/2025

LAST CHANCE
Clinical examples from children and young people who stammer however ACT is relevant for clinicians working with children or parents where communication challenges result in struggle, avoidance, anxiety, worry or self-critical thinking, loss of confidence and self-esteem, or unhelpful ways of responding to events.
For therapists developing their skills in the field of stammering, and those who wish to build their experience of using standard CBT or other psychological approaches.
Theory, practice, ideas and practical activities to take away and use.

23/11/2025

2 days packed with discussion, practical exercises, supported by video observation and case studies.

**Open to ALL PROFESSIONALS working with children and parents in a healthcare or educational setting.
https://michaelpalincentreforstammering.org/tc-events

18/11/2025

“Applicable to so many different areas of our role and client groups, and in so many different contexts. So helpful for developing therapy skills and for understanding the power of hope and curiosity”
“The course content was fantastic – theory so we really understand the rationale and inspiration behind it and also the opportunity to watch a lot of videos so that we could see the approach in action – and this was done in an interactive way so that we could comment/ask questions”

*Led by MPC's Ali Berquez for a Canadian/US timezone.

*Open to all professionals working with children, young people and their parents, in a healthcare or education setting.

*ASHA CEUs available, generously sponsored by Stuttering Foundation of America.

michaelpalincentreforstammering.org/tc-events/

11/11/2025

We welcomed an amazing group of children, parents and visiting trainees to the Michael Palin Centre for Intensive Group Therapy. Lots of fun, discussion, sharing and confidence building.