Black History Month 2026: Representation in the Therapy Room and the Classroom
October is Black History Month in the UK. This year’s theme, “Honouring Our Communities”, invites us to recognise and celebrate the individuals whose everyday contributions help to shape, support and sustain Black life across the United Kingdom: the volunteers, the teachers, the nurses and carers, the community leaders whose work is felt rather than recorded.
For those of us working with children’s speech, language and communication, it’s also a good moment to look honestly at something we handle every single day: the resources we put in front of children.
Why representation matters in communication work
A therapy session or a language intervention group is built almost entirely out of pictures, books, characters, names and examples. Those materials are the medium of the work, and children read them closely.
When a child never sees a face like theirs in the picture cards, never hears a name like theirs in a story, and never recognises the family meal in the vocabulary activity, the message is a quiet one but it lands. When they do see themselves, the opposite happens. They engage more readily, they bring more of their own language, and they are more likely to feel that this is a space where they belong.
There’s a practical dimension too. Children talk most freely about what they know. A vocabulary activity built around unfamiliar foods, unfamiliar celebrations or unfamiliar family structures is harder work than it needs to be, and it can look like a language difficulty when it is really a lack of shared reference points.
An honest look at your resources
This is something any therapist, teacher or teaching assistant can do in twenty minutes, with the materials already in the cupboard.
- Picture cards and symbol sets: who appears in them? Many commercially produced sets are still overwhelmingly white, and some are decades old.
- Books: count how many of the books you reach for regularly feature Black children as central characters, rather than as background figures in a crowd scene.
- Names: whose names appear in your sentence-building activities, your social stories and your worked examples?
- Family and home life: do your materials show a range of family structures, homes, foods, hairstyles and celebrations, or one narrow version of childhood?
- Who holds expertise: in the images you use, who is the doctor, the teacher, the scientist, the leader?
Most of us find gaps. That isn’t a failing; much of what sits in school and clinic cupboards was bought years ago. What matters is what gets added next.
Language difference is not language disorder
This is the point where culturally responsive practice stops being about resources and starts being clinical, and it’s one of the most important distinctions we make.
Many children in London grow up speaking a home language alongside English, or speaking a dialect of English such as Multicultural London English or a Caribbean variety. These are rule-governed, complete and legitimate forms of language. A child using the grammar of their own dialect accurately is not making errors, and a child who is still acquiring English does not, for that reason, have a language disorder.
Confusing difference with disorder leads to over-referral in some groups and under-referral in others, and both do harm. A good speech and language assessment looks at a child’s communication across all of their languages and varieties, draws on what families report about communication at home, and distinguishes clearly between what is different and what is genuinely a difficulty. This is also why standardised tests, which are normed on particular populations, should never be the only evidence behind a decision. Our guide to the common speech and language challenges for school-aged children sets out what we look at and why.
Widening the voices in your setting
Black History Month is a natural prompt to explore Black authors, illustrators, storytellers, historical figures and community leaders, and to bring a wider range of voices into therapy sessions and school environments.
For younger children, picture books work beautifully as therapy material as well as reading material. Titles worth looking at include So Much by Trish Cooke, Look Up! by Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola, the Anna Hibiscus series by Atinuke, and Coming to England by Floella Benjamin. For older pupils, the work of writers such as Malorie Blackman and the poetry of Benjamin Zephaniah offer rich material for comprehension, inference and discussion.
Poetry deserves a particular mention in communication work. It is built for rhythm, repetition and performance, which makes it unusually useful for phonological awareness, prosody, memory and confidence in speaking aloud.
The Black History Month UK website holds a resource pack for schools and community groups, and is a good starting point for anyone planning activities. You can find it at blackhistorymonth.org.uk.
Not just in October
The risk with any awareness month is that it becomes a single display board in the corridor, taken down on 1 November.
Representation does its work through the ordinary and the repeated: the books that are simply on the shelf all year, the picture cards used in every session, the names in every worksheet, the assumption that a child’s home language is an asset rather than an obstacle. A child does not feel seen because of a themed assembly. They feel seen because the room they are in reflects them in February as well as October.
That is also, in a sense, what this year’s theme is pointing at. Honouring our communities means noticing the everyday contributions that hold things together, and the everyday choices we make in our own practice are part of that.
Culturally responsive practice is one of the areas we cover in our training for school staff and in our clinical supervision, because it affects assessment accuracy as much as it affects how welcome a child feels. If it would be useful to look at this with your team, we’re always happy to talk it through.
Happy Black History Month.
If you have concerns about a child’s speech, language or communication, please speak to your GP, who can refer you to your local NHS service, or contact us at enquiries@londonspeechtherapy.co.uk or on 020 3475 2189 to be seen privately.
