Recently, the team at Centre 56 undertook training developed by SIL to improve our ability to care for the emotional wellbeing of the children and families we support.
Many of the families we support are still dealing with the pandemic’s impact, which is now being made worse by the cost-of-living crisis. Families with children aged under 5 years old have been identified as needing support with their emotional health and wellbeing by Public Health Liverpool.
Following the training, we have made a number of changes to support the wellbeing of the children, parents, guardians and our staff.
Through writing action plans for staff, children and parents we have been able to collaborate and reflect on what we were doing and how we could improve it. For example, we have embedded sharing affirmations with children each day to give them positive messages and have developed a sensory circuit in the garden for our children with special educational needs so they can regulate themselves when they feel overwhelmed.
We know that if parental wellbeing is good then it impacts on their children. We have introduced parent workshops, which are nice and social, like cookery courses, upcycling and budget planning. It is good for people to come together again. We’ve also introduced Padlet [a virtual post board] where we share information of outside services available which both staff and parents can access.
For the staff, we have revamped the staff room and introduced a termly budget to be spent on activities to make them feel good. We have an outside company that can provide counselling sessions for staff and have incorporated talking about emotional health and wellbeing into staff meetings.
