We are so grateful to all our incredible supporters - the families we work with, our grant funders, our social media followers, and MASSIVE thanks to our employee team, our trustees, our Advisory Teachers and our volunteers - you are all truly AMAZING!
A quick summary of DS Achieve’s achievements in 2023:
Our Little Achievers pre-school programme, funded by The National Lottery and delivered by Hannah, Sandra, Rachael and Eve (who joined us in May), supported 20 families over the year.
Our Young Achievers programme for school-age children and young people, funded by Children in Need and delivered by Avril (who re-joined us from maternity leave in September), Jo (who provided Avril’s maternity cover), Charlotte N and Charlotte L plus a sizeable volunteer team, have worked with 29 different children with most children returning each term.
Our Resources into School service, supported 26 different children in 2023! This combines bespoke Specialist Down Syndrome Advisory Teacher advice to schools and nurseries combined with the delivery of a practical resource or personalised training to help teachers better support individual children with Down Syndrome specific aspects of their learning.
Our brand new service, Resources into Homes, was launched this year and has had a total of 11 bookings so far. This is a bespoke service for early years children which provides direct training from a Specialist Down Syndrome Advisory Teacher, to parents, on how to use a specialist resource to enable your child to achieve maximum progression with their learning at this early stage.
We're proud to say that our partnership with Hertfordshire Libraries to create volunteering opportunities for young people with Down Syndrome has flourished in 2023. We've delivered (and continue to deliver) specialist training via our Down Syndrome Advisors to a large number of the library staff in Hertfordshire to enable them to fully support young people with Down Syndrome to volunteer, and we now have 5 successful placements underway at libraries around the county.
79 bookings onto our training events during 2023, which included how to ‘Get the Most out of your EHCP Annual Review’, a two part 'What to do when things don't go to plan' EHCP Training Workshop, Dental Care for Children and Young People with Down Syndrome, Supporting Children with Down Syndrome in Education and Supporting Siblings of Children with SEND. Thank you to Helen Long, Tracey Allen, Jigna Patel and the team at Sibs in delivering these courses on our behalf.
Our Empowerment Group held two social events (Meet and Eat and Wreath Making) which were attended by a total of 20 parents, and delivered a programme of Facebook Lives which were viewed approx. 250 times over the year.
Behind the scenes, we said a fond farewell to Bhav, our wonderful Operations Coordinator, and welcomed in Fiona, our new Operations Manager.
In addition to events, we have had huge success with raising awareness, sharing knowledge, information and positivity throughout the year. We’ve issued 16 newsletters to 281 parents and professionals, kept busy on social media and now have 764 followers of our Facebook page, 227 parent carers in our Facebook community group, and kept the website up to date which is now receiving an average of 405 unique visitors each month. We’ve also participated in community events to spread the word about DS Achieve and highlight our range of services, raising awareness and building valuable local relationships.
We're now planning to kick off 2024 with a celebration! We’re planning a party for the whole family to celebrate our 5th birthday. It will be held on Sunday 28th January, 2-4pm, and tickets are available now!
THANK YOU all for your support, hard work, funding, cheerleading, Facebook ‘likes’ and all-around love. We are incredibly grateful and we are looking forward to carrying on delivering these services to you in 2024.
