15th June 2024 The Right to Play: new play spaces opened

Following on from the official opening of our new sensory room last year, we were delighted to invite the Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire back this Summer, to officially open our new soft play centre and our much-awaited new respite garden space.

This past year we’ve been working hard to develop our playable spaces at Rose Road as part of our ongoing Right to Play Project.

We believe every child has the fundamental right to play; to be afforded engaging opportunities for fun and discovery, which in turn lead to improved physical and mental health and wellbeing, improved communication and social skills, and greater independence and resilience.

As the needs of the disabled young people we support are becoming more complex, and their family’s situations are becoming more complicated too, the need to access services based entirely in our building (rather than in the community) has grown in recent years.

This project aims to meet the ever more pressing need to improve our facilities, to give every young person we support more opportunities to access their right to play.

We were delighted therefore to officially open our new soft play centre and the garden in our adult’s respite space this week. Thank you to the Morrisons Foundation, The Mace Foundation, The Masonic Charitable Foundation and the Edward Gostling Foundation for creating new opportunities for disabled children and young people by providing funding for this project.

Tina Fullbrook, Head of Care at Rose Road says: “These new spaces will provide opportunities for children and young adults to experience enriching and physically active play-based sessions during their stay with us. We’re excited to see these long-awaited improvements in our facilities, which also includes specialist equipment for a broader range of ages and needs, for playing, being active and relaxing. As such, these spaces are already being used by a wider group of young people thanks to the increased accessibility and range of activities available to them”.

We are also grateful to Julie Mountain from Play Learning Life for working with our staff and young people to design the outdoor space, to the team at Scandor for developing the space (including shifting many wheelbarrows of rubble through our building!) to Questmap for funding the new tree and to TJ Waste for generously donating skip and waste removal throughout the project.