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In 2001 Guildford’s Children’s Centre acquired an early years play bus to provide outreach to Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) sites and their families. The play bus was purchased as a result of a successful collaborative bid with Surrey’s Traveller education service, Surrey County Council and local nurseries.
The team visited several other mobile projects (not necessarily for Travellers) to decide the specifications. They then chose a company that was willing to involve the centre’s staff at all stages of the bus design.
The Children’s Centre decided it would lease the bus rather than buy it to keep down maintenance costs.
The team included a qualified teacher and two teaching assistants, with field officers from the Traveller education service. This collaboration was vital to the success of the play bus because of the good relationships and trust that the field workers had established within the local GRT communities.
The whole team received GRT awareness training from the charity, Save the Children. This included:
Mandy Watters, lead teacher at the Children’s Centre, shared her vision for her team:
'It’s about mirrors and windows. Mirrors enable us to reflect our own culture and windows allow us to see the culture of others.'
In September 2004, the team began to resource the play bus with GRT cultural references such as books, posters and play equipment.
By April 2005 they had begun to visit sites. The field workers’ knowledge of families of GRT heritage helped them identify which sites met the criteria for a visit by the bus.
By September 2005 risk assessments had been undertaken, and provision was gradually expanded.
One of the main aims of the project was to ensure that families of GRT heritage accessed local early years settings successfully.
A measure of the success of the project is that children who attended play bus have moved into mainstream schools. As a result, numbers in the play bus and Children’s Centre have started to fall, allowing it to serve new sites.
It is important that local schools continue to promote diversity and be inclusive for children of GRT heritage, maintaining the ’mirrors and windows’ approach that was so successful in the play bus project.
As one father of a play bus user said to Mandy Watters:
'You showed us that not all Gorgers [house dwellers] are the same.'
For further information about strategies at Guildford Children’s Centre, please contact: mandy@guildfordchildrenscentre.surrey.sch.uk
