Working in a Children’s Centre

Woman 1: A children’s Centre is a centre for children and families, where we are providing a range of services for the families including nursery places for 3 and 4 year olds and nursery places for 2 year olds. We have places for children to come over a whole extended day so that families can work, parent can work.

Woman 2: Worried, concerned, need help, need support in anything, they should be able to come here and someway we will signpost it, we will either support them, help them or signpost them to where they can go. That’s what a Children’s Centre is, that parents can just turn up or they can use it as a centre where they meet other mum’s, its peer groups all those sort of things. We’ve got a Community Paediatrician who’s based here. We’ve got School Nurses that do school drop ins for children after school. We have Speech and Language Therapists, who are here, who do pre-school children and school age children and we have a Developmental Nursery Unit for children with special needs, pre-school children.

Woman 1: We’ve got a very good range of nursery provision for the children, including a wonderful outdoor area, which we use a lot with the children. We’re focusing on the 5 outcomes obviously, for children, really trying to encompass that in a multi-agency or multi-facet way so that families see this as a one-stop shop.

Woman 2: It provides sessional care, full day care, holiday club, after school club. We have Homestart that come in to do voluntary work with families, then we have lots of different individual groups that come in, we have a twins group, twins and multiple birth group, it’s a support group. We have 3 different teenage mum’s groups, some very young.

Woman 1: The parent drop in is a group for parents in the community, who can access it, as they want to, which we feel is very important for children. Its very popular, a lot of local families use it. We have got a lovely big hall, so we can set it up with some structured activities. Introducing children to perhaps some new toys, try and put in some activities that perhaps you might not be able to do at home and for the children to be active as well.

Woman 2: We have the youth service that’s here, because we do 0 to 19 and within the youth centre we have alternative education and then in the evening it becomes a youth centre.

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