The ERB Centre: BAME students on Speech and Language therapy Training Programme.

The ERB Centre, also known as the Centre for Equality Research in Brain Sciences, offers funding and opportunities for research that promote equality, diversity, and inclusion.

Authors, Christina Smith and Rachel Reeves conducted a research project on exploring students’ experiences from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds on a pre-registration speech and language therapy training programme.

They discovered, previous research with students from BAME backgrounds on physiotherapy training programmes identified themes that included: feeling like an outsider, lack of understanding of cultural and ethnic differences and lack of power and influence. The speech and language therapy profession has even fewer members from BAME backgrounds.  Therefore, this study will aim to discover whether similar or different themes arise with speech and language therapy students.

All students on the MSc Speech and Language Sciences programme (approximately 120 students) were invited to participate in an online focus group if they identify themselves as being from a BAME background. Christina and Rachel recruited a research assistant not associated with the programme, to run the focus group with ten students, using a topic guide developed from the literature.

The Zoom platform was used to record the group conversation during the focus group. This will enable the generated high quality transcript automatically. The research assistant (supervised by the applicants) conducted an analysis on the transcript and took the lead in writing the report.

Ethical guidelines were followed. The student volunteers were asked for consent after being provided with the relevant information. Only the research assistant knew the names of the participants and, during the focus group, they instructed the participants not to use each other’s names. The recording was deleted once the anonymised transcription was completed.

Themes arising from the analysis indicate issues to be addressed on the programme and other programmes for health professionals at UCL and other higher education institutes.

To keep up with the latest news from The Centre for Equality Research in Brain Sciences (the ERB Centre), kindly visit their website. In case of any inquiries, feel free to reach out to fbs.edi@ucl.ac.uk via email.