Our Story

We kept seeing the same gap. Children could explain complex ideas, tell detailed stories and communicate confidently in conversation, but when they were asked to write, something changed. Their ideas became shorter, their language became simpler, or they struggled to get started at all. Yet the finished piece was often being used to judge what they understood and what they were capable of.

In many ways, we recognised that gap because we had experienced it ourselves. Our own writing journeys had taught us that what ends up on the page does not always reflect the thinking, ideas or capability behind it. Writing can be difficult for reasons that have very little to do with how much someone knows or has to say. As a Speech Pathologist and Occupational Therapist, we were also trained to look at children through different lenses. One of us naturally looked at language, ideas and communication; the other at motor skills, regulation, participation and the demands of the task. Neither perspective told the whole story on its own. But when we brought them together, we could see more.

That is where The Attuned Spot began. Attuned reflects the way we work: paying attention to the individual child and looking beyond the difficulty we can immediately see. Spot represents the place where different perspectives come together, including home, school and clinic; speech pathology and occupational therapy; what we see on the page and what may be happening underneath it. We started bringing that thinking to writing. Instead of only looking at the finished piece, we looked at what a child could communicate orally compared with what they could express in writing, where they became stuck across the writing process, and how language, thinking, physical skills and emotional readiness interacted along the way. That thinking became Attuned2Write™. It changed the question from “How good is this writing?” to “What is getting in the way of this child showing us what they can do?”

Today, The Attuned Spot is about bringing that understanding beyond any one profession or setting. We want families, educators and clinicians to have a shared way of understanding the same child, recognising their strengths and making clearer decisions about what comes next. Because writing should never determine what a child is capable of communicating, achieving or becoming.