Baby Sensory for Children’s Centres - Client Testimonial

“I first became interested in running Baby Sensory sessions strictly as a weekly activity for parents.  However, after closer investigation and attendance of Dr. Lin Day’s class in Salisbury, it became apparent that it would provide a great deal more than just an activity to local families.

Not only do the sessions help families to make friends and have a nice time, they also provide direct information to parents to educate them about baby development and encourage bonding and interaction in a non threatening way.  Babies are given an educational sensory experience that they may not encounter until they are much older and parents are able to pick up simple yet effective ideas to take away and try with their baby at home.  Not only does this help parents to educate their children, it boosts parental confidence and gives parents a sense of achievement.

Above all, the programme provides a means of prevention with our most vulnerable families.  By encouraging parents to engage in Baby Sensory in the 1^st year of their baby’s life, we are hopefully preventing future issues such as bonding problems, poor interaction and sleep problems from escalating. Baby Sensory is a great way of getting parents to use our Centres and therefore meeting the government agenda for Sure Start Programmes because the sessions provide a service for both parent and baby within the first year of their baby’s life. Once we have engaged with families through such a successful programme we anticipate that they will continue to use our services until their children reach the age of five. We have now implemented Baby Sensory into our Centre, as an ongoing programme, by investing in training for our staff team to allow them to run sessions.  This has been a great success as it helped our staff team to work directly with parents and identify difficulties.

It has been, by far, our most successful session and we have now had such a high demand for places on the course that we are running 2 courses a week at each centre and have an ever increasing waiting list.  Baby Sensory appears to be so infectious that we hardly need to advertise as parents are continuing to spread the word. 

We now look forward to opening our third Children’s Centre and third class in September of this year“.

Josie Pyke  BA (Hons,) PGCE - Children’s Centre Team Leader