Information for Childcare Settings

Childcare Settings

Wiltshire Council commission us to work with all families which have a child from conception to five years old. Therefore, any of the services which appear in our pages for parents can be offered to your families. If you think that we can help, then please contact us.

As well as our own groups, we can also deliver within your own setting if this is easier. For example, we can deliver the National Literacy Trust’s Early Words Together programme to your two year old children, or the Bookstart programme to your three and four year olds.

In addition to these services, we are also able to offer the following.  These have all been designed to support children in childcare settings.

Five to Thrive trauma informed support

Central to the Five to Thrive approach is the set of five key activities: Respond, Cuddle/Engage, Relax, Play and Talk. These are the ‘building blocks for a healthy brain’, and are drawn from research into the key processes of attachment and attunement that forge bonds between young children and their carers.  Crucially, they are designed to support positive feedback processes, enabling practitioners to observe and reinforce positive interaction.

The ethos is both powerful and flexible, meaning that we can provide support in many ways including:

• Working on a one to one basis with the child and parent in your school or at their home
• Delivering sessions within your school, either with or without parents
• Delivering training to your Reception teacher to co-facilitate Five to Thrive groups in your school and to use in their own practice in the classroom.

For more information about how we use the Five to Thrive approach in the children’s centres, please see the Parenting section in the information for parents.

Five to Thrive can help children deal with a multitude of stressors, including:

• Covid-19
• Domestic abuse in the family
• Parental conflict and/or separation
• Coping with transition points in the child’s life (ie starting school)

Freedom for Children

Children who have lived, or are living, with domestic abuse are often the forgotten victims. Children can fall through the cracks, with very few services to help them understand what has happened and to support them as individuals.

Children often do not have the vocabulary to voice their needs or experiences, and it is important that we recognise behaviours in which we can identify the experiences of the child. It is more obvious when these behaviours are such that the child becomes seen as being ‘disruptive’, but it is just as likely that the child will become a people pleaser, always willing to help, hardworking, kind, a pleasure to have in class. School may be the only place the child receives any encouragement or praise and so they will work really hard to gain this.

Through this programme, children are supported to understand what has happened, or is happening around them. They experience a safe place where they can tell their own story to a practitioner who looks to interpret their behaviours as much as their words. Where the child is old enough, they will learn to identify any abusive adults in their lives in terms such as the ‘bully dragon’, the ‘liar dragon’ or the ‘jailer dragon’, as well as identify the safe adults in their lives who show the opposite behaviours, making them the ‘friendly dragon’, the ‘truth-teller dragon’ and the ‘freedom dragon’.

Parenting

All of the parenting programmes listed in the Our Services page can also be delivered within your setting. This includes the Being a Parent programme, where we could deliver to a cohort of your parents. If you would be interested in this, then please do contact us.