Chailey Heritage Foundation
As a culmination of my year as President of Croydon Circle I had the great pleasure and immense satisfaction of visiting Chailey Heritage School to present Joy Dyson, the Foundation’s Community and Events Fundraiser with a cheque for £1,680. I was accompanied by my wife Adelia, who has been fundamental in our efforts to fundraise for this very worthwhile charity. Croydon Circle Ladies raised £600 at a Bring and Buy sale in May of last year and other donations were received from the generosity of Brothers and their wives after viewing Adelia’s Zoom cookery demonstrations during the course of 2021-22.
Joy Dyson took the time to tell us about the history of Chailey Heritage School. We were taken to meet the staff and residents and I was struck by the wonderful care being afforded the young people in their charge. An overwhelmingly humbling experience!
We were taken to meet Faith, granddaughter of our good friends, Paul and Teresa Gibbs, who like many of the residents and day pupils at Chailey, has a severe neurodisability and is confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak or see and has other sensory and mobility impairments.
Chailey Heritage Foundation and School was founded by Grace Kimmins, who was moved by many children born with severe physical disabilities and for whom education was non-existent. Her plan was to build a school specifically for these children, in the countryside where the beauties of life could be experienced, which would educate and teach them a craft to ensure independence in adulthood. She found an old workhouse at Chailey in East Sussex on 6th June 1903 and arrived with seven boys.
By 1936 the school had re-sited and expanded into a boys’ and a separate girls’ schools three miles away, still in Chailey – both equipped with operating theatres and medical facilities where education and treatment could be practised together.
Today Chailey Heritage Foundation provides education and care services and is one of the UK’s leading centres for disabled children and young people. Their expertise is in maximising the children’s independence by developing effective communication and providing powered mobility opportunities. It continues to embrace founder Grace Kimmins’ ethos – the belief that each child and young person should have every opportunity to fulfil their potential, no matter what the challenges. In doing so, Chailey has developed a world-class range of specialist services that are necessary to meet the needs of these disabled young people.
The impact of the Foundation’s services comes not just in how many children and young people use their services but in the difference they make to their lives and that of their families.
More information about Chailey can be obtained from their website: www.chf.org.uk
Frank Delicata
April 2022