St. Paul's Community Development Trust - St. Paul's Community Trust

locating support for children and families with complex or
serious needs. The Centre has now begun to help train
Social Work students.
A second important theme in the work of the Children’s
Centre is early years care and education. Again, the task
calls for help for nurseries and child care settings across
the neighbourhood, to develop their services. There are
statutory, voluntary and private nurseries in Balsall Heath,
and the Children’s Centre teacher supports all of these,
especially in curriculum matters. The Centre helps to
fund places for children with emergency or priority needs
and seeks to bring the practitioners together from time
to time to discuss joint concerns and interests within the
Sparkbrook Early Years and Family Support Network. The
Toy Library service is valued by all settings and tours the
neighbourhood. A new programme is supporting early
years staff in promoting Personal, Social and Emotional
Development of children. This supplements other work on
behaviour management and speech development. Finally,
an important part of the Centre’s work is providing crèches
and ‘stay and play’ for parents who do not have ongoing
child care, but want occasional care while they are attending
classes or meetings.
Towards the end of the year the Trust took on responsibility
for children who had attended Al Hira Nursery when it closed
at short notice. The Children’s Centre base at St. Barnabas
was turned into a 24 place Nursery, to the relief of parents. A
successful and smooth transition was made by staff, despite
the unexpected nature of the change.
St. Paul’s Nursery occupies the ground floor of the Centre’s
building and is a 56 place, year round, eight till six service.
In fact, it caters for far more children than is suggested by its
full-time capacity. Many attend only part-time, which means
that there are usually over 80 children and families served
during the 50 week working year. Our Nursery has built
considerable strength since gaining its present premises
and has achieved high occupancy rates throughout the
year. It has done so despite the difficulties of meeting needs
of parents for different kinds of part-time provision, and
the challenge of making child care affordable while also
ensuring that ends meet. St. Paul’s Nursery was very much
to the fore in helping Al Hira to survive – by finding ways of
cooking meals for their children, for example, as they have
no kitchen.
The Nursery staff have been researching ways of helping
children to accomplish easy transition to school – helped
by Park Hill School - and have been complimented on the
attainment of their leavers.
Also managed directly is the Chatterbox Playgroup, which
is based in Moseley, using premises which are shared with
one of the Trust’s playcare settings. This is a very popular
playgroup which again has high take up.
Government and Local Authority have emphasised and
supported staff development for the children’s workforce.
The Centre staff have been enthusiastic to benefit from this
– and the Trust is eager to share in this, so as to ensure high
quality services. This year several staff have been working
4 St. Paul’s Community Development Trust