It is a rare and severe child speech impediment but students at one Perth primary school have twice the reason to understand apraxia, with two of their classmates living with the condition.
According to the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, one in 1000 children have childhood apraxia of speech, a neurological speech sound disorder that makes it difficult to speak.
Speech Pathology Australia says people living with CAS “know what they want to say” but words or sounds might come out the wrong way.
For Kardinya Primary student Quinn Angel, it took almost a year to be diagnosed with CAS after he was not hitting speech milestones at about age two.
Mum Sian said after eight months of speech therapy with no progress, she was told Quinn, who is now four, likely had apraxia.
“For eight months, he was having nearly weekly speech therapy and made zero progress, literally nothing,” Ms Angel said.
“That’s when (the speech therapist) said ‘well I think it’s apraxia’. It was as soon as she changed her therapy strategy, he started trying to speak a bit more.”
Ms Angel said the diagnosis was overwhelming at first because she didn’t have answers about when Quinn would be able to speak clearly and fluently.
“It’s a complex speech disorder,” she said.
“And it has, in a way, long-lasting impacts … it also means reading is going to be hard, writing is going to be hard.”
She wants to see “greater understanding” from the Government around the condition and its impact on schooling.
“The amount of fight we have to go through to get that (support) funding has been quite disappointing,” she said.
During May, dozens of locations across WA will be lit up in blue — which is the symbolic international colour for apraxia — including The Bell Tower, the Mandurah Bridge, Scitech, Fremantle Prison and the Queens Park Theatre in Geraldton.
And for the students of Kardinya Primary School, May 15 will be a “wear something blue” day for the entire cohort.
Ms Angel said learning another student at Kardinya had apraxia gave her the confidence it would not be an “unknown condition” and that teachers might be “more confident” in meeting Quinn’s needs.
“Quinn has had the most positive start to school at Kardinya,” she said.
“I could not fault the support and the inclusion he has been given.”
For the students of the southern suburbs primary, awareness days are an ingrained annual event, which are usually held four times a year to honour students living with a certain condition.
School principal Melanie Clark said the annual events were an opportunity to increase awareness and inclusivity among students.
“What we’ve found is that people seem to have far more empathy and understanding for those students,” she said.
“We don’t put a big banner up and say, look, it’s these children. But what we say is, we have some children in this school, that have either this learning difficulty or this disability.
“It’s all about us being inclusive and having knowledge of what that child is facing on a daily basis to come to school and being able to access school the same way as everyone else.”