Sheffield infant school recognised at national awards for improving lives of autistic students

Royd Nursery and Infant School, in Deepcar, was nominated for the National Autistic Society's Inspirational Education Provision Award by the NHS Speech and Language Therapy Services department who were impressed by the school’s Rainbow Room which offers specialist support to those with autism.

The Rainbow Room was set up three years ago when four children entered school who were on the autistic spectrum and pre-verbal – a term often used to describe autistic children who do not use spoken language.

After realising a mainstream classroom would not meet their needs, staff opted to develop a more specialist teaching resource by turning a spare classroom into an autism friendly room where there is a high emphasis on alternative communication methods such as makaton – a language programme that uses symbols, signs and speech to enable people to communicate – and other visual learning approaches.

Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator (SENCO), Joanna Swales, who works in the Rainbow Room, said: “We feel honoured, very proud, quite overwhelmed and humbled that somebody has actually taken the time to nominate us for the award.

“At present, we have got five children who all have complex needs, all of them at present have an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis and in a mainstream classroom, their needs could not be met so we decided to change what we do and set up a small provision to help meet the need of those children.

“In a mainstream classroom, they are just overwhelmed; by the stimulation, by the noise, by the levels of speaking that happens that they don’t understand and they can’t communicate as effectively as some children, so we just break everything down.”

The annual Autism Professional Awards seek to acknowledge the outstanding contributions and achievements of individuals, teams and organisations who are making a difference to autistic people and their families and the winners were announced at a special ceremony at Birmingham Town Hall on Thursday, February 27.

Royd Nursery Infants narrowly missed out on the award to Westwood Day Nursery, in Coventry, who won in the ‘Inspirational Education Provision - Primary and Younger’ category.