Paces’ business is supporting families.
Paces is a strategic project: aiming at nothing less than the transformation of opportunities open to parents in the upbringing of children with motor disorders. Paces’ strategic vision is the embedding of ‘conductive education’ routinely in the institutions with which parents interact: locally regionally, nationally.
The Paces’ Project is not solely about being an outstanding small, private special school, somewhere in South Yorkshire – no matter how excellent Ofsted says that school is; no matter how proud we are of its success.
For Paces, like ‘conductive upbringing’, is about Life not only classrooms. Paces is about banishing the fears of parents for our children becoming adults – and giving substance to our hopes: for our very youngest children even before school; and for when they leave school, venturing into adulthood, independence and citizenship.
Our children. Our hopes.
Paces is of parents, by parents, for families.
The Paces Campus is an exemplar; a test bed; a model; as much a beacon as a service; a way of demonstrating what can be achieved that cannot be denied. It is a place of co-operation and collaboration; nationally unique and innovative; serving two communities with a distinctive governance form; which should, like all the groups and people that comprise the Campus, be celebrated.
For all these reasons, we are engaged in winning ‘hearts and minds’; in taking our proposition not just to parents, wherever we can reach them, but to those who make public policy and decide strategy; who manage public services’ delivery and control budgets; those who promote research and provide training; those who would be sponsors and friends. We must keep inviting, talking, engaging.
The road is not easy. The temptation - the release from frustrations, the escape from knock-backs - is to retreat into thinking operationally; to imagine that having and building a fine school is all that really matters; to settle for that.
Unless it is simply to be an oddity, a local one-off, sooner-or-later unsustainable, Paces is and must continue to be, above all, strategic. That is how we will best support families.
