PPEL Project

Running from the 1st of January 2008 to the 31st of March 2008.

We are currently undertaking a project funded by Birmingham City Council entitled Parents as Partners in Early Learning (PPEL). This project has the principle objective of involving parents in their child’s development from an early age. We have had many activities running for this project including Stay & Play sessions, one to one observation, home visits and other outreach activities.

For this project, we have placed a particular emphasis on speech and language development. Last year, we undertook a 12 week Speech Therapy pilot project with New Deal for Communities where we employed Edwin Lawrence, a specialist speech therapist, to screen all of the children who attend the centre and work closely with some of those that he felt required intervention. We achieved encouraging results and all of the children who worked closely with Edwin and his team showed significant improvement in the development of their speech and language.

We have been able to once again use Edwin and follow the same template for the PPEL project, with the emphasis on involving parents in the sessions to help them understand how important they are to this area of their child’s development. The knock on effect of the previous project and this one has also helped us train our staff in assessing language development and engagement, which has obviously opened up new ways of helping the children develop from babies upward. We have also specialist support from a psychotherapist who has been specifically observing babies, which has also opened our minds to different methods of assessing behaviour and developmental issues.

We will have an update on the outcome of the project after Easter and will keep you informed of any other projects we have coming up in the future.