Children with special educational needs will be helped to cope with the loss of a parent
About 75 children with special educational needs who have lost a parent will get help and support thanks to a grant to the Winston’s Wish charity.
The £60,000 grant to Winston’s Wish is specifically aimed at supporting bereaved young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) who may need different support to suit their needs as they grow up with their grief.
Winston’s Wish offers a range of services designed to support children 12 and younger to explore grief through arts and play such as creative therapy. The charity also provides special support and content designed for 13–25-year-olds on the charity’s Talk Grief website which includes real life stories and articles about what it is like to grow up with grief.
Winston’s Wish has strong origins in Gloucester where it was started more than 30 years ago in 1992. Today, the charity has grown to be a national organisation with widespread reach pioneering digitally led support to bereaved children and young people. The charity also offers support to the adults around these children from parents to education providers and offers special training to teachers, those in funeral services and so on.
Owing to its heritage in Gloucestershire, representatives of Winston’s Wish including a member of the Winston’s Wish Youth Team, made up of young people with lived experience of bereavement, alongside the Winston’s Wish Bear – a life-sized mascot – joined with Gloucestershire Freemasons to formally accept the generous grant.
Estimates suggest that, devastatingly, each day, more than 100 children in the UK are bereaved of a parent and that figure does not equate how many young people are coping with the death of a sibling, grandparent, friend, or another significant individual in their lives.
Each year Winston’s Wish supports and impacts the lives of more than 80,000 grieving children and young people when their lives are turned upside down by bereavement.
We’re delighted that, thanks to the kind and generous grant from Gloucestershire Freemasons, we’re able to offer Creative Therapies on a wider scale. It’s important to us, as the UK’s first children and young people’s bereavement charity to be true to our vision that no young person is left to grieve alone and that includes young people who may benefit from different forms of support, such as Creative Therapies.
I’m really pleased we’ve been able to help Winston’s Wish with their hugely important programme working with children with special educational needs coping with the loss of a parent. It’s very hard for any child to cope with a death of that kind, but especially so for those children who have difficulties in communication. Winston’s Wish do wonderful work in helping them to accept their loss and move on with their lives.
