The Sheiling Ringwood's new Sensory Garden is an exciting open space where students can safely enjoy the great outdoors through rich sensory experiences.
In 2017, we awarded more than £120,000 to The Sheiling Ringwood to construct new classrooms to support Sheiling College. We’ve been delighted to support the school again more recently with a grant of £15,000 to create their new Sensory Garden.
Rachel Staff, Trusts and Grants Fundraiser at The Sheiling Ringwood, explains: “We’re on an incredible site here; a unique setting populated with trees, outdoor spaces, and gardens. The Sheiling Ringwood is based among woodlands, where we’ve carved out spaces to use for teaching our community. Gardening and nature are integral to what we do here and our approach with students.”
Founded in 1958, The Sheiling Ringwood is an independent school for students from age 6 to 25 with a special educational need. The school’s therapeutic environment is set among 45-acres of mixed woodland, helping young people to engage with the world around them through relationships, community, and wellbeing.
Rachel adds: “We wanted to create a completely tranquil space where we could really focus on touch, taste, smell, sight and sound. Everything here is designed to encourage; to feel the tree and feel its roughness… Even the grasses in the centre of our garden will grow up to be the perfect height to swish your hands through. It’s taken a huge amount of time and effort to get this space exactly right for our needs; everything from gradients of paths through to choices of planting, and inclusion of a water feature that taps into several senses.
“Boris Moscoff, an artist, friend and former staff member, was inspired to create beautiful stained-glass panels at the Sensory Garden’s entrance. These work so well in the setting, with light flowing through the glass to create colours, shade, and brightness.”
Simon Coe, the school’s Occupational Therapist, reports that after using the space, his group of students are at ‘baseline’ level for the remainder of their day, and intends to repeat the session to gather more evidence.
He says: “I used the Sensory Garden this week for a group Occupational Therapy session. I gave all staff and students a bingo card to find and look at, smell, watch plants and animals, and to look at and engage with the water feature and coloured glass panel. All my students were in the sensory garden and were engaging in a group task together and the students were gaining l sensory feedback from the touching the trees, smelling the plants and watching the water run down the water feature – for most of the population, this form of sensory input is very calming.”
“We’ve been so very fortunate to have had a lot of fantastic support from the Trust. It’s been a big job, but it's fantastic example of what can be achieved!”
— Rachel Staff, Grants and Trusts Fundraiser, The Sheiling Ringwood
