Bath Area Play Project

Bath Area Play Project

At a glance

Causes

  • Children / families
  • Young people

Other details

Organisation type: 
Charity
Geographical remit: 
Local

Objectives

Bath Area Play Project is a small voluntary organisation and registered charity that provides a range of services for children, young people and families in the Bath area as well as support for adults working with children and young people including training. We have an excellent staff team who together with Trustees are totally committed to providing a range of inclusive and child-centred services and working with those most in need. Play is the right of every child and is essential to children’s development yet, today, children are becoming risk averse and unhealthy due to lack of freedom based mainly around parental anxiety and fears.
Established in 1979 by volunteers, we have grown into an organisation with excellent relationships with Commissioners, a good understanding of Government policy that relates to children yet is grounded with services developed based on what children and young people tell us matters to them. Since our beginning we have focused our work in areas of the city now described as disadvantaged and in super output areas from the IMD. These haven’t changed in 30+ years mainly due to generational dysfunction. Bath is perceived as an affluent area, however there are parts of the city, predominantly with high social housing populations, that do not have the community capacity to do things themselves and so become reliant on intervention.
Trustees and Staff worked hard on developing a Business Plan, Implementation Plan and have developed strategic objectives where progress is reviewed every 2 months. This ensures that we remain focussed on priorities as well as developing an impact measurement tools to show how outcomes are being met by services. Working with families in areas of social inequality remain a priority.
We hold the ISO9000 Quality Management Award and we follow all systems for dealing with complaints and compliance with legislative requirements, training and development of staff and volunteers and Charity Law.
BAPP provide a range of services which are directly accessed by children and young people themselves as well as support for schools and individuals working with children and young people. BAPP’s services are funded whether through contracts with the Local Authority, Grants from Trusts or through fees paid by parents or beneficiaries.

Activities

Direct services include open-access Community Play Ranger sessions after school in local parks and green spaces. Holiday playschemes specifically for disabled children and inclusive playscheme for both disabled and non-disabled children. A Pre-school for children from 12 months with play at the centre of their learning. Youth provision including the fully inclusive SOFA programme in the summer, Teenage Rampage, a youth club for disabled teenagers and BA2 a mainstream youth provision.

We provide training courses open to any staff working with children and young people and run the Children & Young People’s network, supporting over 200 voluntary and community sector groups to have representation at strategic level boards as well as Network meetings and a monthly e-bulletin. This ensures that even the small scale groups are able to keep up to date.

We have more recently developed a Family Play Support Service which supports children who are referred to it which is funded through a contract with B&NES and a Reaching Communities grant. The service builds on what we have achieved to date but extending the workforce to enable greater capacity to ensure those children and families who need the service, can access it. The team works directly with children, young people and families to tackle inter-generational disadvantage affecting families and their relationship with their children and the resulting poor attachment. Families living with mental health issues struggle to nurture their children. This project helps tackle the social isolation faced by most families where due to their or their child’s behaviour; they feel disconnected from their community and unable to form meaningful connections resulting in low self-esteem and reliance on crisis intervention. This project builds on their strengths together using play as a non threatening and honest approach which is a child-centred and acts as a catalyst for psoitive change.

No current opportunities

Search for volunteer opportunities with other organisations.