About us – 13 years of changing lives for the better

Sioban Boyce, Managing Director of Not Just Talking, qualified as a Speech and Language Therapist in 1978 and worked in the NHS for 18 years. During her career she repeatedly came across children who could speak perfectly well but who couldn’t participate in social interactions appropriately. Sioban made a causal link between inappropriate behaviour patterns and an inability to communicate effectively with others. This applied even when a diagnosis (e.g. Attention Deficit Disorder, Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome) had been given.

In 1996 she set up Not Just Talking and became a Communication and Behaviour Specialist. She made connections between failure to develop sufficient non-verbal conversational skills in the period before a baby starts to talk and subsequent socialisation and behavioural difficulties. Moving from a traditional Speech and Language Therapy or behaviourist approach (i.e. teaching the child particular behaviour and then rewarding them for good behaviour) to one based on developmental principles (i.e. teaching interpretive skills and various communication techniques) began to produce compelling results.

Sioban developed a unique and highly successful intervention programme to improve children’s non-verbal skills. Since then Not Just Talking has been going from strength to strength enabling children to communicate effectively. Sioban has also developed training and support packages to help both parents/caregivers and professionals in understanding non-verbal communication and helping children with problems in this area.

Since the successful launch of her first book, Helping your child communicate – from day one, Sioban is now focussing on writing the next books in the series. These will be aimed at developing communication in children from when they start to talk to when they go to school and others will be aimed at professionals working with children.

The services Not Just Talking offers help with prevention and this includes training parents and professionals. It includes training professionals in assessing and delivering Not Just Talking’s unique and highly effective intervention to children 5-19 years of age.