The Co-operative Food - North Baddesley, Seymour Parade

St Mary's serves one of the poorest wards in Southampton - over 50% of our children are entitled to Free School Meals and nearly three-quarters attract the pupil premium funding (a marker of poverty). Our work with neighbourly will support us to open a foodbank, a community resource to serve our parents and children so that they may take what they need - when they need it. We hope that local supermarkets will be generous in supporting us with food that would otherwise be wasted, which will be utilised to support our most vulnerable families first - through boxes and food hampers. With the rest reaching our school community at the end of the day - posted on our Facebook page and through our school website. Hungry children cannot learn, retain and understand information as well as their peers.

For over 40 years, Romsey Family Support Group (RFSG) has been offering a lifeline to families in and around Romsey who are living in relative poverty or facing difficult circumstances. We provide a safe, supportive space where parents and children can find help, understanding, and community. We support families facing a wide range of challenges, including domestic violence, postnatal depression, isolation, low self-esteem, debt, and managing children’s behaviour. By offering preventative support, we aim to stop families from reaching crisis point. Families can be referred by health visitors, GPs, children’s services, or families can simply self-refer. Our community creche, for children aged 0–5, is run by dedicated volunteers. This space gives parents much-needed respite, along with the chance to talk through problems and build friendships. We signpost families to essential services such as Romsey Foodbank, Solicitors, and Christians Against Poverty. Beyond day-to-day support, we organise guest speakers and family outings. Thanks to generous donations, we also provide food, clothing, books, toys, and equipment, saving families thousands of pounds each year. RFSG is almost entirely funded through the kindness of local organisations, businesses, and individuals and we provide our services to families at no cost to them.

Family Links Nurturing Programme is a successful programme run for parents/carers at North Baddesley Infant School. Our school understood that for parents/carers to be able to access this successful parenting course, they would have to travel to Andover. Which at the time was the closest available. Committing to 10 weeks, with the cost of travel and often organising young families was challenging for our local families. Our headteacher decided to train our two pastoral leads, Kate Calder and Julie Cundy so that we could offer this programme locally. Family Links Nurturing Programme now runs three times a year, in our school Lookout - a learning space within our school. We have already run five successful programmes, and are looking at planning our sixth to start early next year. Each programme has had incredible feedback with one family saying "every parent should do this programme". So what is the nurturing programme? It is 10 week programme that helps support the emotional health and wellbeing of the whole family. Parents/carers can come on their own, as a couple or bring a friend/family member. It's run in a nurturing way - we offer free tea/coffee and treats, supply the nurturing programme book to every family (often for free as we do not want money to be a barrier) and support via our new family links email in between session. Once the programme has finished, we hold coffee morning's/evenings to carry on the support once the sessions are finished. This fantastic course does run at a cost to the school, so we rely on help from the local community to help support us in any way they can. We have had donations from local shops to provide refreshments, and The Rotary gave us a donation when we started to help provide the books to our families at no cost. We try to run each course at a different times to make it available to all our families across the year - we hold evening ones to support our families that work at least once a year. With the evening course we also run a free creche if childcare is a barrier. This is run by school staff so the children have adults that are familiar to them. Our evening courses, which are extremely popular do incur more costs. The school stays open until 8pm, so site staff are required for closing late these evenings. Families are often signposted to us to do the course by other professionals, however anyone can come along and do the programme. We want it to be accessible to all our families in our community as believe in the impact it can have in supporting our families mental wellbeing - something that is so important for us to look after and nurture. Please do look at our school social media pages with videos and feedback from our families. The Family Links website gives a good overview of what the course is all about.