White System, Black Therapist: What I Need Early Years Educators to Sit With

 

I want to begin with something personal, because this work did not begin in theory. It began in experience.

I remember being placed in a separate group at school, not fully understanding why, only knowing that I had been moved. I remember being corrected, repeatedly, not just for what I said but how I said it. Being told, in different ways, that my language was not right, that it needed adjusting, that I needed adjusting. I remember the feeling of being seen as something to fix, without ever being fully understood.

That feeling has stayed with me.

And when I walk into early years spaces now, when I hear children being described in particular ways, when I see how quickly difference becomes something to be managed, I recognise that same feeling. Not always as visible, not always as direct, but present.

That is where this book comes from.

I wrote White System, Black Therapist because I could not keep walking into early years spaces and pretend that what I was seeing was neutral. There is something that happens in those first moments when a child enters a room. It is subtle, almost invisible, but it shapes everything. We notice. We compare. We begin to decide who they are.

I have sat in meetings where a child is described as “behind”, “confused”, “not where they should be”, and then I meet that same child and something in me resists. Because what I see does not align with what has already been fixed about them. In the book, I write about a boy who had just entered school and was quickly understood through deficit. His speech was questioned, his language marked as wrong. But when I sat with him, I saw a child whose learning lived in story, in movement, in relationship. He was not lacking. He was being read through a system that did not know how to see him.

That realisation does not stay contained. It opens everything.

Because it asks us to look again at the systems we trust. The assessments we rely on. The language we use to describe children. In my wider work, particularly in my research on standardised testing in speech and language therapy, I have traced these practices back to their roots, and what becomes clear is not comfortable. These assessments are not neutral tools. They are shaped by histories of eugenics and colonial thinking, where language and intelligence were used to rank human beings against an imagined ideal, one rooted in whiteness .

Standardised testing, in this sense, has always been about more than understanding children. It has been about measuring distance from a norm, creating categories of normal and disordered, and legitimising those categories through the language of objectivity. What we now call developmental language disorder or delay sits within that legacy. These are not simply clinical descriptions; they are constructed through systems that privilege certain ways of speaking and being, while rendering others as lacking.

So when we say a child is behind, we have to ask: behind what?

And when we say a child has a disorder, we have to ask: according to whose language?

These questions matter, especially for Black and racialised children, who are more likely to be misread through these systems. Their language is more likely to be pathologised, their difference more likely to be interpreted as deficit.

This is also why I have had to think deeply about the field itself.

Speech and language therapy, like many professions, remains largely white. And with that comes a particular set of perspectives that are often positioned as authoritative, as evidence-based, as beyond question. When work begins to challenge this, to trace these practices back to colonial histories, to centre race, to ask uncomfortable questions about diagnosis and power, there is often resistance.

I experienced that while writing this book.

There were attempts to question the legitimacy of the work, to frame it as lacking an evidence base, to describe it as too political, too disruptive, even “toxic”. And I think it is important to say this plainly, because this is how systems protect themselves. They draw boundaries around what counts as knowledge. They position certain voices as credible and others as excessive, emotional, or unscientific.

But what counts as evidence has always been shaped by power.

The very systems being defended, standardised testing, diagnostic categories, normative frameworks, are themselves rooted in ideologies that were never neutral. They were built within colonial and racialised contexts, and continue to operate within them. To question them is not to lack rigour. It is to extend it.

This is why we must continue to speak.

Because silence maintains the system. It keeps things as they are.

And often, those closest to the work, those in early years settings, those who spend the most time with children, are the ones who see most clearly where things do not sit right.

You see children across the day, in their fullness, not just in a single assessment moment. You see the richness of their communication, the ways they move between languages, the ways they make meaning. And yet, too often, your knowledge is positioned as secondary, something to be validated by those deemed to hold expertise.

I want to challenge that.

Because you are not just practitioners. You are knowledge holders.

And part of this work is trusting that. Writing what you see. Naming what you notice. Questioning what does not sit right, even when it goes against established ways of thinking.

This is also why my work with Tapestry sits alongside this book. The guides on intersectionality and linguistic justice were written to support early years educators in holding these questions in their everyday practice. They ask us to look again at whose language is centred, whose identities are recognised, and how systems shape what we see as normal.

And alongside all of this, I return to something that has become central to my thinking and practice, what I have written about as spaces of reprieve.

These are not abstract ideas. They are necessary.

Spaces of reprieve are spaces where children are not constantly being measured, corrected or evaluated. Spaces that move away from what can often feel like hostile environments shaped by standard language ideologies, and towards something more human, more relational, more freeing.

Spaces where children can speak without being watched.
Where their language is not positioned as wrong.
Where they can exist without being reshaped.

Because when a child is given that space, something shifts.

They begin to show us more of who they are.

And perhaps that is where this work really begins.

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