Catterick Garrison Pre-school – creating spaces for additional needs
Catterick Garrison Preschool, Yellow Ribbon, were awarded £12,700 through the Early Years programme to create new learning spaces for children and babies with additional needs.
The Early Years Joyful and Engaging project aimed to create enriching learning environments, enabling children to realise their full learning potential. This involved acquiring suitable furniture to enhance physical development and establishing purpose-built play areas tailored to each age group, nurturing imaginative play with additional plans of a new preschool room to be established for the older children.
Enhanced environment for child development
The setting acquired appropriate furniture to enable babies to confidently take their first steps, providing a safe space free from obstacles. A sleep room has enhanced routine, encouraging children to sleep in dedicated areas, and a physical and sensory room supports the needs of children with SEND, development of gross motor skills and core development, bringing enjoyment to all the children.
Early Years Coordinator and Manager, Claire Marshall, said: “This has shown amazing results with the team overwhelmed of the abilities the babies have achieved by being supported to feel safe to take risks.”
The immediate wider impact has been increased availability for military families, with an average number of babies attending rapidly increasing. An additional six spaces to military families have now been offered with 28 children registered at the provision.
Claire adds: “We quickly reached more families than we were expecting, we have not had numbers this high for over 10 years.”
By February 2024, the playgroup recruited two additional staff members to join the expanding team.
Claire continues: “With the transitional life of military families being high, and an increase of neurodiversity in early years, the grant has given me the time to write an Early Years curriculum that is inclusive to our provision.
The curriculum highlights the importance of a repetitive learning environment for our youngest children and the impact of this is already visible with no neurotypical children being identified as needing additional support in learning due to this repetitive learning environment.”
Creating an inclusive sensory haven
The Early Years programme enabled the playgroup to create an inclusive physical and sensory room for children to explore. The room includes resources that support climbing, bouncing, balancing, spinning and mats that provide different sensory experiences. The room also has calming sensory areas with sensory lamps, galaxy lights, bubbles and dens. These can help with the needs of the SEND children, providing a calm and safe space to explore.
Claire said: “The impact at Yellow Ribbon has been wonderful and the difference we have witnessed in the children’s abilities in such a short period of time has been very positive.”
Creating meaningful change
The introduction of the new curriculum has made an impact on all the children and the team. The grant enabled Claire, who had recently trained to be an Early Years Teacher, to build a curriculum that flows throughout the provision, reducing planning and paperwork for the team, leaving more time to support play and learning.
She adds: “The curriculum creates pathways for each child’s development and adults can easily identify what stage a child is, simply by observing and listening to keyworkers language and activities. The whole curriculum leads to children eventually being school ready.
“With several Service children joining Early Years from the age of three years – and English as an additional language impacting some children’s development – the curriculum helps keyworkers revisit activities in audiology and language development and shared attention activities, so that gaps in development can be rapidly closed.”