Help Stormont House School Gardening Club blossom!

Stormont House School is launching its first ever gardening club in order to build our young people's confidence and skills, support their wellbeing, and make our outside environment as colourful and thriving as the inside of our classrooms.

Stormont House School is an exceptional and widely-respected special school designed to meet the needs of students with a combination of communication & interaction needs with moderate learning difficulties. These needs would significantly affect their ability to learn, thrive and develop in a secondary mainstream setting. We became one of the first outstanding schools in the country in 2005 and have improved at each of the 4 full inspections since then (most recently in April 2024).

It is a school priority to improve our students’ and staff wellbeing, and to prepare our young people for adulthood by developing and sustaining good physical and mental health. We believe getting our students outside to work, play, and enjoy nature is one way to achieve this. Our school budget allows us to staff a weekly gardening club, but with funds tight nationally, we have limited resources to actually 'do' the gardening. Because our school community is among the most deprived nationally, fewer of our parents have the resources to contribute directly to this, so we need to reach out further.

The school and community are now coming together to fundraise £1,500 for seeds, bulbs, and necessary equipment to allow the club to blossom! With the generous help of some local partners and a lot of hard work from dedicated and passionate members of staff, we've been able to transform some of the structures in our outside space, but we desperately need to maintain what has been established so the roots can fully take hold and the fruits of that labour don't go to waste!