When I was in Grade 7, I raised my hand and volunteered to read aloud in class. After a few words, I began to stutter. My teacher stopped me and told me to raise my hand again when I could “speak properly”. I still remember those words.
I had done what children are encouraged to do: participate. I knew how to read. I knew the words. But in a few seconds, I learnt something about participation: I could speak up, but only if my words came out the “right way”.
For a child who stutters, experiences like these can influence whether they raise their hand the next time, volunteer to speak, ask a question, or decide that staying quiet feels safer. Although the classroom may change, the assumption can remain.
About one in 100 adults stutter, across languages and dialects. Up to one in 10 children experience stuttering at some point during childhood.
Fluency is often mistaken for confidence. A quick answer can seem more prepared. A smooth presentation can appear more persuasive. A block, that is when a word gets stuck and no sound comes out, can be mistaken for nervousness.
However, stuttering is not caused by anxiety. Research points to differences in how the brain produces speech, and it often runs in families. A pause does not mean someone does not know the answer. A repetition does not mean they are unprepared. Taking longer to say something does not make the thought behind it any less valuable. Yet many people who stutter learn to manage other people’s reactions to their speech.
That can mean changing a word before anyone notices it is difficult to say, avoiding a phone call, rehearsing an introduction repeatedly, or staying quiet in a meeting because finding the right moment to enter the conversation feels harder than letting the idea go. These behaviors are often invisible. The listener may never know how much planning went into a sentence before it was spoken, or how many sentences were never spoken at all.
This is where it becomes important to separate fluency from competence. Nowhere is that distinction more consequential than in the places where participation shapes opportunity: schools, recruitment and the workplace.
Consider a typical job interview. An interviewer may unconsciously interpret hesitation as a lack of preparation or favour the candidate who responds quickly and smoothly. But what is the interview actually trying to measure? Is it the candidate’s knowledge, judgment, experience and ability to do the job? Or is it how fluently they can deliver an answer under pressure?
Sometimes the changes needed are remarkably small. Give someone time to finish. Do not complete their sentence unless they ask you to. When someone takes longer to speak, resist filling the pause simply because the silence feels uncomfortable. At home, the same patience matters: listen to what a child says, not how smoothly they say it. But individual behaviour is only part of the answer.
Inclusion should not depend on whether a child happens to have an understanding teacher or an employee happens to have an considerate manager. We can build better defaults into the places where people speak.
In Abu Dhabi, Department of Education and Knowledge policies already provide a framework for supporting students with additional learning needs and providing assessment accommodations. The next step is for schools to make sure stuttering is understood within that framework, including when children are reading aloud, giving presentations or participating in class.
Teachers should give advance notice before oral work, ask what helps and provide appropriate flexibility. The goal should not be to remove speaking opportunities, but to make sure participation does not become a test of fluency.
Recruitment processes deserve the same scrutiny. Employers should build flexibility into recruitment from the start. Interview invitations should make clear what options are available, such as sufficient time to answer, the opportunity to supplement an answer in writing, or alternatives to phone-only screening where spontaneous speech is not essential to the role.
Crucially, the process should build in basic flexibility rather than making it available only after someone discloses a stutter.
Job descriptions also matter. Employers should define communication according to what a role genuinely requires, rather than using terms such as “articulate” as shorthand for ability.
In addition, inclusion should continue once someone is hired. Meetings should not reward the fastest speaker only. Sharing agendas in advance, limiting interruptions, providing more than one way to contribute and helping managers understand that a block is not a sign of nervousness are simple changes that can benefit far more people than those who stutter.
None of this lowers standards – it makes them clearer. Assess knowledge when knowledge is what matters. Assess ideas when ideas are what matter. Assess fluency only when fluency is genuinely relevant. This is not special treatment, it is better design.
For more than a decade, The Stutter Community has created spaces where people with speech impediments can connect and speak without first proving they can articulate fluently. Yet most of life happens outside those spaces, in classrooms, interviews and offices. That is why our work also extends into schools and workplaces, helping those environments become more inclusive.
When I think back to that classroom, what I needed was simple: I needed time to finish. In that spirit, inclusion begins not by asking people who stutter to sound more like everyone else, but by creating classrooms, recruitment processes and workplaces where different ways of speaking have the same opportunity to be heard.
A moment costs the listener nothing. For someone who stutters, it can be the difference between speaking and staying silent. Give us one.
