Speech Pathology is not tutoring

First language skills continue to develop over our primary and secondary school life, through tertiary education and hopefully, on into our adulthood.
In our practice we work with upper primary and secondary students (as well as younger students). I find parents of these older students seem to confuse Speech Pathology with English tutoring. They are not the same.
A Speech Pathologist’s ‘brief’ is therapy. Remediation. Supporting teachers, but not teaching content (though we may well be involved – should be involved with pre-teaching – for another blog!). Rather, we teach students with a language disorder how to learn language, and ‘back fill’ gaps in a student’s language-learning in a logical and evidence-based way, to support their continued language-learning.
A Speech Pathologist is trained to identify where a student is ‘at’ in their language development and to move them on to the next developmental stage/items. We also know the struggles a student with a language disorder has in learning language, so can empathise with them, and work with them to find a way to learn difficult language concepts, vocabulary and sentence structures. We can also teach them how they need to tackle the difficult task of remembering a huge amount of curriculum content (= language) for tests and exams.
Therefore, Speech Pathology intervention is not a ‘quick fix’ of revision before exams, but a long-term prospect that needs to be conducted over each school year, in close consultation with class teachers (to support learning of the curriculum content).