Online speech therapy in Urdu and English for families in the UK

Ask your nursery or school to start support now, because they do not need a diagnosis or a therapist’s report to begin. Write down every word your child says over one week, counting both languages. Build two or three short language routines into ordinary days. A child who arrives at their NHS appointment already practising is in a better place than one who waited quietly.

The route in usually starts with your health visitor, your GP or the SENCo at nursery or school. In many parts of the UK a parent can refer to children’s speech and language therapy directly, so ring your local service and ask what they allow. Arrangements differ by area and change, which is why we will not tell you what your own trust or board does.

What we do in that window is deliberately narrow. We watch your child on video during ordinary play, pick two or three things you can change in how you respond, and practise them with you live. Our free age-by-age milestone checklists take two minutes and are worth filling in before any appointment, ours or theirs.

Count your child’s words across every language they use, not one. A child with fourteen words in Urdu and ten in English, four of which are the same idea in both, has a vocabulary of twenty, not ten. Growing up bilingual does not cause a speech delay. A genuine delay shows up in both languages, not only in English.

The two lists rarely grow at the same speed. Urdu, Punjabi or Pahari comes from you, from grandparents and from phone calls home. English arrives in a nursery room where your child may be the quietest in the group for a full term. Nursery staff see only the English list, and that is often what starts the first conversation. You are the only person who sees both. We go through this properly in does bilingualism cause speech delay?

Some things are not about language at all, and those we look at hardest. Does your child turn when you say their name. Do they point at something to show you, not only to ask for it. Do they copy a gesture, or share a look when something is funny. Those signals read the same in Urdu and in English, which makes them more useful than a word count in a bilingual home.

Most are British-Pakistani parents whose child is already on an NHS list, or whose nursery has raised a concern and left them unsure what happens next. Many arrive by word of mouth in tight community networks in Bradford and Birmingham. We also work with families who split the year between Britain and Pakistan: because we sit in Multan, coaching carries on through a long summer there instead of stopping for six weeks. If a family moves on later, our pages for families in India and for Pakistani families in Australia run the same Urdu-and-English format.

Plenty of parents message us in plain Roman Urdu, which is completely fine: bacha bolta nahi, der se bol raha hai, zaban saaf nahi, aik jagah nahi baithta. You do not have to translate your worry into clinical English before you talk to us. اسپیچ تھیراپسٹ سے بات اردو میں بھی ہو سکتی ہے۔

It is an ordinary video call on a phone or a laptop, usually late afternoon or early evening UK time. No app to install, no clinic room, no travelling across a city in the rain with a tired three-year-old.

We ask a parent to keep the camera on the child during normal play rather than sitting them in front of the screen. Watching your child stack blocks, push a toy away or ask for a biscuit tells us more than a described version of the same moment. We pause, suggest one change in how you respond, and you try it while we watch. Every session closes with one or two things to practise, written down in whichever language you read more easily.

You do not need a diagnosis, an appointment or a resource to begin. Five habits do most of the early work in a bilingual British home, and what usually shifts first is not new words but how much your child tries to communicate.

• Give the word, do not test for it. Instead of asking “what is this?”, say “doodh — you want doodh” and hand it over. Questions put a struggling child on the spot; models give them something to copy.
• Wait longer than feels comfortable. Count five slow seconds after you speak. In a busy household many children never get a gap big enough to answer in.
• One language per person, not per sentence. If you speak Urdu and nursery speaks English, that is a clean split a child can learn from. Mixing inside a sentence is normal and harmless, but a steady pattern is easier.
• Narrate the boring bits. Coat, buggy, door, bus, school. Repetition inside ordinary routines beats a special half-hour of teaching.
• Turn the background off. A television or tablet running behind play swallows the very sounds your child is trying to pick out.

Keep a short note of what changes over a fortnight: new words, more pointing, longer looking at your face. Take it to your NHS appointment or bring it to your first call with us. It is the most useful thing a parent can hand a therapist, and it costs nothing.

Speak to your GP or health visitor first if your child was not babbling by around a year, has lost words or skills they already had, does not seem to respond to sound, is choking or struggling with feeding and swallowing, or has had a sudden change in behaviour or movement. Those are reasons to be seen face to face, not reasons to panic, and we will say so on the first call rather than take the session.

We also refer on for anything needing hands-on or locally regulated work: a formal diagnosis, a hearing test, clinical occupational therapy or physiotherapy, medication decisions, and any report a school or council needs in a set format. Online parent coaching sits alongside that care, never in place of it.

If you are not sure which of those two you are looking at, send a short message with your child’s age and what is worrying you, on WhatsApp at +92 314 6040262 or through our contact page. The first consultation is free, and sometimes the honest answer is simply “book the hearing test first”.