| Projects Our current projects are here summarised: Please click to view.
Although now unfortunately closed, the Symbol Academy has enjoyed a growing reputation in the field of learning difficulties. Many educators, families and health professionals have visited the school and have asked to emulate the ‘Academy Experience’, we have also seen a huge demand for:
In response to this demand, Symbol Trust wishes to create a Virtual Academy to share best practice from teaching methods currently employed. We would like to see our techniques adopted by teachers and their support staff up and down the country and to illustrate with practical demonstrations, the unique benefits we are able to bring children in both mainstream and special schools. The aim of this project is to therefore package our entire teaching programme into a ‘virtual’ web based resource, which will be hosted over the internet and freely accessible to educators, therapists and parents alike. The site will also include an interactive facility where viewers over the internet will be able to sit in ‘live’ at real time during classes. This new project will build upon work already undertaken during 2006 and 2007. Additionally, the Symbol Trust plans to second a qualified Speech and Language Therapist from Symbol UK for the purpose of writing a series of 12 booklets aimed at supporting this project and many of the resources pioneered at the school. The Trust is seeking to raise £35,600 to develop phase 1 of this project. Using some of the facilities of the Academy, the eXtra service is an out of school hours programme for children who have parents with a learning disability and who, for this reason often have a greatly impaired education. The aim of this new service will be to help fill gaps in their learning experience, for example, in the early years by helping their parents to stimulate language enrichment and play to help ensure typical child development. For the older child, we aim to supplement their mainstream education with focused after school help to ensure that each child can keep up with their peers and to aid in their emotional development. The programme is aimed to help 20 families in the first instance, but we will be further researching into the particular needs of this vulnerable client group so that on publication, social and educational practices can be changed to meet this unmet need. We also hope to be able to establish a peer support network for these children and by undertaking school holiday activity days. The Trust is seeking £55,000 per annum to run the Extra project consisting largely of salary costs of seconded specialist staff; head teacher role, clinical psychologist, support staff and volunteers, occupational therapists, teaching assistants and clinical psychologists. The first project undertaken by the Trust was the production of a film, called “Now We’re Talking”, which was created in 2003 to demonstrate the communication potential of children with Down syndrome given the appropriate support. These were distributed to parents of new born babies with Down syndrome and have been hugely popular, so much so that we now plan to burn further copies of this CD. We also plan to fund Now We’re Talking 2 which will be aimed at therapists to help them to work more effectively with children with Down Syndrome. The Trust is looking for £20,000 over 2007-08 to fund the ‘treatment’, filming and production cost, in readiness for distribution to therapists nationally. Working with The Down’s Syndrome Association Symbol has an excellent reputation in providing therapy support to people with learning disabilities and is well known within this area. The Down’s Syndrome Association has appointed Tessa Duffy as the Association’s communication adviser and Symbol therapists are now available to help the charity’s membership at any time. Symbol will also be working with the Down’s Syndrome Association and three additional researchers from the University of Strathclyde to undertake the largest ever study of children with Down Syndrome in the UK. This long-awaited research project will offer the proof that speech really is the key to unlocking every child’s potential in the classroom. If you’re interested in finding out more about this and other research
programmes, please contact the Trust on 01795 844440 or e-mail info@SymbolTrust.org |