Anne Harding-Bell has 30 years' experience as a Cleft Specialist SLT, of which 20 years included part-time academic positions supporting and leading the post-graduate studies programme for cleft specialist SLTs. Her knowledge about cleft palate speech developed while she was studying for her PhD with Prof. Pamela Grunwell (1987-1993). Later, in 2000, when cleft palate services were centralised there was a need for accreditation of SLTs providing specialist services.

 

Anne led the development of the Master's level postgraduate course in Cambridge which later moved to University of Sheffield. During this period Anne also developed the clinical service for the new East of England Cleft Lip and Palate Network and she contributed to the development of national guidance documents for UK specialist SLT services. Since retiring from her NHS role in 2014, her focus has been on developing and maintaining post-graduate education for SLT specialists both nationally and internationally.

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Anne’s publications with Prof. Pam Grunwell provided an accessible knowledge base for the development of the speech assessments, GOS.SP.ASS’98 and CAPS-A. In addition, her therapy approach, multi-sensory input modelling (Harding & Bryan 2000) has become increasingly popular in the cleft palate field particularly with developing speech and with infants during the first year of life.

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A new textbook "Case Studies in Cleft Palate Speech: data analysis and principled intervention" (2019) provides a study resource with a wealth of video material.

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Continuing clinical and research interests include:

1. Identification of the impact of conductive hearing loss on speech development

2. Development of an electronic speech assessment with potential for automated phonological analysis.

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Acknowledgements

During the development of the original CAPS-A training resource Anne was employed by both Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, in the East of England Cleft Lip and Palate Network, at Addenbrookes Hospital,(Cleft.NET.East) and by University of Sheffield in the Department of Human Communication Sciences. We are particularly indebted to Per Hall and the Cleft.NET.East SLT service for permission to use video data from their archive of speech recordings.