The Parliamentary Review aims to share best practice amongst policy makers and business leaders by commissioning articles on events of the year and contributors’ areas of expertise. Over 1 million copies will be distributed this year. A range of businesses from a number of sectors have written for the upcoming release, the aim being to get their message out to the country at large, to inform policy makers, assist their peers, and ultimately to raise standards.
Tree Tops has contributed to the 2019 Parliamentary Review and celebrated the publication at a Gala event in the Houses of Parliament on the 4 September 2019. Our article focused on understanding sensory processing difficulties (SPD), in particular the many difficulties our children experience in education from academically under-performing to anxiety and potentially exclusions. The article strives to explain how sensory processing difficulties can result in challenging behaviours and affect a child’s social and emotional well-being. Our message was to stress how effective our interventions can be within the school environment to help children access learning, but also give school staff more tools to target many youngster’s complex needs Tree Tops endeavours to educate schools to understand SPD and integrate interventions into the classroom routine. We firmly believe that if Head teachers understood that by working in partnership with Tree Tops all children would have more chance of success whilst reducing the resources needed to support them in the long term.
One of our mainstream schools Thornhill Primary, in Shildon kindly allowed us to take photos of the children in the motor skills groups to illustrate how our programmes can be integrated into the school day to benefit the children. Thornhill is testament to our belief of the long term benefits of working together. They have worked in partnership with Tree Tops for over 5 years and continue to expand our provision into different aspects of education. We are currently working to integrate interventions alongside education into early years whilst still running the daily motor skills groups.
When we were at the Houses of Parliament we met many other small businesses from all sectors. The experience highlighted how unique we are, as there are very few children’s OT services in the UK, especially ones offering sensory integration treatment and interventions. Guest speakers included Gold Olympian winner Denise Lewis who delivered an inspiring speech on role models, finding opportunities and achievement. She was really interested in our work and it struck me how little support there is for our children with SPD to integrate into sports. Chatting to her I did think of our youngsters who struggle to overcome some of their challenges so need a lot of support and interventions to facilitate this. Our role at Tree Tops is to educate others to understand the children’s difficulties and needs whilst implementing the tools and techniques to facilitate the child’s ability to succeed. As Denise stressed, positive experiences with support ultimately lead to enhanced self-esteem and confidence, which is fundamentally important for all children.
