A nice past memory...

 Sandra spotted this on MSN and recognised a couple of faces. Funny thing being, she hadn't noticed the picture in the Lynn News (I never read it)

Reason it's a nice past memory for me?

Back then I was Deputy SENCO at Downham and Sandra was a Children's Activities Development Worker with King's Lynn & West Norfolk Council. At the time they had been trying to put together 8 holiday playschemes at various primary schools in West Norfolk, including the one in Downham. 7 of these fell through including the Downham scheme which irritated me a bit. 

So  I said that I would take over the Downham scheme and use the Special Needs Department classroom/suite. The main scheme had already been trying to recruit staff before it fell through, I sorted things with the school, Sandra and I got together, set up new interviews, including involvement with the Norfolk Children's Fund,  got the funding from several sources, interviewed, arranged training for and hired staff based on the ones previously looked at and set up a scheme that ran for (I think) 65 days of the year during school holidays.

So basically I was the scheme manager working in cooperation with the Borough Council (the school had made it quite clear that apart from providing the room, technically hiring the staff, taking in the money we had arranged and paying out wages they wanted nothing to do with the scheme itself - it was all on me!)

The most satisfying part of it all was Sarah. She was working as Deputy Manager in a Pizza bar at the time even though she had a Degree in Childcare. Working on the Playscheme gave her the confidence to start getting other jobs within childcare and then going for teacher training! Funny part about it - at the end of the interview she said 'You don't remember me do you Mr Young. I was in your Form in Year 8'. Well, that was 10 years earlier, there were 30 kids in the form and being in SN I didn't see any of them apart from Form!

I should point out that the photo is copyright the Lynn News being used by me under fair useage terms!