Our Story

How we began

PACSO came into being in the late 1990s.

Our story has evolved through connections and friendships that have lasted over the years to create the special community that PACSO has become.

In 1998, Clare Elkington was an Occupational Therapist in the NHS & also worked freelance to coordinate Community Playschemes for Revelation Family Church. Chris North, a social worker in the Child Disability Team, invited Clare to join a focus group of professionals working with children and young people with a disability in the Chichester and Arun area. All the professionals had busy caseloads but recognised the need to also support parents and carers. The group asked Clare to facilitate six lunches for parents to see if there was a need for more support. There clearly was...

The lunches, funded by Social Services, began in January 1999. One parent, Cherry Gillbard, suggested that the group should be called ‘Parents And Carers Support Organisation’ or PACSO for short, as she needed something to call our group in her diary, and the name stuck! Attendance at the lunches increased and by the end of the year we had seen 63 different parents and carers. The parents expressed their need for respite, so Clare began to organise a playscheme especially for them. New to fundraising, she applied to National Lottery Awards for All and received the full grant to run our first playscheme in 2000.

Around this time, Clare met Ruth Stewart and Becky Edwards. Ruth was a Fine Art student with a passion for enabling children with a disability. She offered to help with 'a bit of admin' at PACSO in her spare time, and then joined Clare running the first Playscheme. Ruth gradually did more and more, and eventually she and Becky took over running PACSO when Clare’s girls came along. Since then, Ruth has developed our very special Little PACSO service for families who have a child with additional needs under five. Becky was an experienced teacher, especially of children with autism, so her skills were invaluable. When Clare and Becky met, it took just a few cups of coffee before they were dreaming up ideas for PACSO! Becky worked for PACSO leading in the playroom, training staff, and has been a Trustee for many years. She now teaches Childhood Studies at Chichester University and has taken PACSO with her, establishing the Resilience Evenings in partnership with Chichester University.

Playschemes and our ethos

The Child Disability Team gave us lots of encouragement to run the first playscheme, especially Debbie Buckwell who advocated for us throughout her career. For many years, PACSO events ran from The Venue, a huge, carpeted warehouse managed by Revelation Family Church, who offered us a reduced rent. Shortly after the first Playscheme, PACSO registered with the Charity Commission and with Ofsted as an out of school provider. Our summer holiday Playschemes became the flagship event, and the parents and carers were soon asking us to run Saturday clubs, Playdays at other school holidays, and an accessible cinema event. We grew a team of casual Playworkers who became very good at creating makeshift sensory rooms and dens from sheets and fairy lights hung from the ceiling!

All children, no matter their abilities or challenges, seem to enjoy sensory play, so we designed activities around what the children can feel, hear, see, and move with. We prided ourselves in offering play opportunities to all the children in a family until our demand for 1:1 places increased so significantly that it became impossible to include siblings, but we hope to return to that one day. Although many of the PACSO children had developmental delays, we took the approach that PACSO isn’t ‘school’. We purposely designed a play space that was safe and where all children could relax and enjoy themselves at whatever level they were able to on that day. Learning often occurred but wasn’t the main goal. We set out to meet every child’s needs even if it was very complicated!

New clubs, kayaks, and a minibus

PACSO services continued to grow and develop in response to the parents and carers requests, particularly for After School Clubs where children with a disability could have fun and experience activities that they were often excluded from in the mainstream. When national Short Breaks funding became available in 2010, we were successful in establishing our first contract with West Sussex County Council; with the remainder of our funding coming from trusts and foundations.

In 2014, we collaborated with Christian Youth Enterprises (CYE), a local sailing centre at Cobnor, who helped us buy our own kayaks. Summer evenings messing about on the water has been a highlight for many of our youngsters over the years.

In 2016, we collaborated with Chichester Nursery School & Family Centre and bought a share in a minibus, which enabled us to collect children from the special schools to attend PACSO After School Clubs, extending the hours of respite for the parents and carers.

Behind the scenes

As PACSO has grown, so has our need for administrative support. We’ve had some wonderful, committed staff who have worked tirelessly to support our administration, finance, and fundraising, and who were often seen multi-tasking between a computer desk and a play session or driving the minibus!

At the start, the management of PACSO was overseen by a governing committee of parents representing the needs of different kinds of disability. This was important as we wanted to ensure our services met all kinds of needs. In 2016, the committee was replaced by a Board of Trustees composed of volunteers with the skills, knowledge and experience to take PACSO forward. The trustees all had a personal connection to a child with additional needs, and took responsibility for an area of governance, such as safeguarding and finance.

The Play Team

The Trustees have often said that our biggest asset is our incredible PACSO Team of staff and volunteers, many of whom began volunteering as teenagers, became paid Playworkers and then have gone on to qualify as Physio, Speech, and Occupational Therapists as well as Paediatric nurses. Emily Medway was our first volunteer at the Playscheme in 2001. Since then, she has worked in all the roles from Playworker to Play Manager covering Ruth’s maternity leave for a year. She then trained as a physio and returned as a Trustee.

Several whole families have got involved in PACSO; many of our staff and workshop leaders’ children have volunteered and then become Playworkers for PACSO. It has been amazing to see many Playworkers give up annual leave from their full-time careers, to return and work for PACSO each summer! Once in the PACSO community, people seem to stay.

In 2010, we began to appoint full-time Play Specialists as the demand for weekly services increased; we just had to fundraise harder! The Play Specialists led the Playworkers and did an amazing job come rain or shine; they always had smiles and energy to give the children a fun time and give parents and carers a moment of respite. Their dedication to care for our families was outstanding.

Emma Drain is one of the team who has gone through all our ranks. Emma volunteered from school at 16, worked as a casual Playworker all through university, and then gave up her successful career in teaching to work for us full time as Play Manager. In 2021, in the middle of a global pandemic, the Trustees appointed Emma as our Chief Executive Officer to lead PACSO into the next phase of our story.

Expert care

From the early days, parents and carers said that they would relax more when leaving their child with us if we had a nurse. So, for many years, we employed a paediatric nurse to manage the medication and see to any medical needs of the children. It became difficult to retain the same nurse to get to know all the children, so we created a Care Lead role and now also train all our permanent staff in advanced first aid. All staff have behaviour management training, and Clare and Becky return each year to train the staff in our ethos and teach about sensory play.

Covid-19

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, the Easter holiday play events were cancelled overnight. Over the next 18 months, the Play Team frequently adapted services to support the PACSO families in the safest way possible. The team delivered activity packs to children, hosted ‘distanced’ meet ups, produced a month-long online Playscheme, and offered a playroom for individual families that was sanitised between each use!

PACSO base

When The Venue was sold in 2014, PACSO moved the children’s events to Fordwater School and the Chichester Nursery School. Our office base has moved a few times, and we have often dreamed of having our own base with everything in one place, somewhere to just open a cupboard to set up, rather than fetch and lug boxes of toys from random (kindly lent) garages before each Saturday Club, Play-Day and Youthscheme.

Then in 2018, as a legacy for their son Jonathan, the Gillbard family gifted us a plot of land to build an inclusive playground and permanent home for PACSO. The location of the plot wasn’t accessible by public transport, so the family generously allowed us to sell the land to create a sizeable, restricted fund for a PACSO Hub. The story continues…

25 years and growing

It is amazing to look back over 25 years to see what PACSO has become. The many people who have shaped our little charity to be the best we can, the parents and carers we have supported, and of course the children who make the wonderful world of PACSO.

PACSO 21st Birthday Ball

Consecutive PACSO Managers 1999 to 2024 (from right to left)

Emma Drain, Emily Medway, Ruth Stewart, Becky Edwards & Clare Elkington