00:00Wallsend is poised for a transformative boost after the Wallsend Children's Community secured
00:05nearly £500,000 from the National Lottery Community Fund. This funding will support a
00:11groundbreaking five-year initiative aimed at drawing schools, families and the wider community
00:16closer together. Recognising parents as lifelong educators and strengthening local support systems
00:23for children. I'm Jill Gray and I work for Wallsend Children's Community which is a place-based
00:29systems change operation, bit of a mouthful but basically it means that we work with families
00:35and organisations across the Wallsend area for the benefit of the children. We believe that the old
00:41African proverb takes the village to raise a child, in other words it's a collective responsibility of
00:48raising children and we all have an influence on those children. We're a very small team and across
00:53the area we work with parents, families, children, organisations and schools to gather information
01:01for things that aren't working very well in the system for children and then we work with the
01:07partners to try and make changes for the benefit of everybody. So this project came about because
01:14we've seen through our research during Covid that the school was the place that parents went to,
01:20they were the people they trusted for information for how to keep the children safe and for what to do
01:25and we've seen a little bit of a decline since then and there's various reasons for that. One of
01:31those reasons being extra pressure on schools, they're now expected to do so much they've got to look at
01:36the behaviour of the children, the mental health of the children, support the parents as well as educate
01:42the children and that's their day job and a lot of the things that that's put onto them from government
01:49is one without you know beyond their training but beyond their capacity they've got a lot to do in a
01:55few short hours each day. We also have parents view, we have community champions who work with our
02:00community development officer and nobody argues with the fact that the parent is the first and most
02:06enduring educator of children that is just a given but what we need to do is work together for the benefit
02:12of the children. We do a lot of surveys and research across all of the three those three areas
02:18the parents the children and the schools and from that research we know that each of our 17 schools
02:24in Moore's End have got a very distinct community around them so there is no one way fits all for
02:30them so the hope of this project is that we can identify what will work in each individual school
02:36and then that's how we'll we'll pull this together. In five years time when we finish this project we'll
02:42have just general normal practice will be that a parent and a school work very closely together for
02:50the benefit of their child and the child will be more ready to learn while it's in the classroom and that
02:56learning can be extended when they're at home.
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