Clear Sky Children's Charity provides Play and Creative Arts therapeutic services to children in schools, and provides parenting support and professional training for practitioners all over the UK. Clear Sky supports vulnerable children who have experienced a traumatic event or who are suffering with emotional or behavioural issues.
Throughout 2023/4 we have again seen an uplift in demand for therapeutic support from schools. We delivered over 2000 therapeutic sessions during the academic year in schools, an increase of around 20% on the previous period.
Children continue to present with a range of complex emotional and behavioural needs, some of which are likely still to reflect the ongoing impacts of lockdown and the resultant behavioural and educational disruption that this caused. We continue to grow our therapeutic headcount and have recruited a number of new and trainee therapists in the past year to help us to meet demand.
We worked in 36 schools across our region in the past year and directly with well over 100 children. New developments within the year included our development of online training programmes and our first ever Power of Play Conference.
We delivered our suite of professional training programmes to over 300 professionals including those from the NHS and the Education Unions.
Our online learning Institute for Attachment play professionals: the Institute for
Play and Attachment, now in its 6th year remains well supported, despite continuing economic struggles and we have attracted a number of new members whilst retaining the majority of our founder members. We will be hosting our second conference in November 2024 following the huge success of our pilot event in 2023 are extremely proud of the programme that we have developed for the event which was independently CPD accredited.
We hope that this report gives a flavour of the work that Clear Sky has been able to achieve this year. We are very grateful to the Trustees of The Pixel Fund for their generous support for our work.