Supporting Schools

Ace Children’s Occupational Therapy Ltd was established in 2012 by Alison Cairns. We provide a paediatric occupational therapy service, placing the child’s needs at the heart of it and are proud of the work we do supporting children, families and schools.

We work with children and young people aged 2-25 years, who have conditions or difficulties such as

• Autism
• ADHD / ADD
• Specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia
• Handwriting difficulties
• Gross and fine motor skills / dyspraxia / DCD
• Developmental delay
• Mild, moderate, severe and profound learning disabilities
• Access to the community, activities of daily living and self-care skills
• Sensory processing difficulties
• Difficulties within self-regulation
• Mild mental health issues such as anxiety.

We work with schools and local authorities across Hampshire, and cover areas of Surrey and Berkshire, as well as delivering services for private families from our clinic in Crondall.

During the Summer of 2022 we were proud to have passed an audit with Hampshire County Council SEND services as an external provider of therapies for EHC plans, in all settings across the county.

OT INFORMATION FOR SCHOOLS

Our team consists of highly specialised OTs, who are used to working within pre-school, school and post 16 and post 19 settings, as well as within EOTAS or home-based settings.

Our OTs consist of full time and part time post holders, ranging from Band 6-8 levels (which relate to NHS bandings), many having post degree qualifications in Sensory Integration, in addition to many years of working experience in paediatrics.

Our qualified OTs are all Health Care Professions Council (HCPC) registered and Royal College of Occupational Therapist (RCOT) members. HCPC is the UK’s national body for registration for all Occupational Therapists. Without HCPC registration an OT cannot practice in the UK.

Our team is further enhanced by our skilled team of OT Assistants (OTA) and OT Technicians (OTT), who come with a variety of background skills and knowledge such as teaching or mental health nursing. Our OTAs and OTTs provide provision of treatment under the guidance of OTs within all environments.

All our team have valid DBS certification and required insurance.

You can find out more about our team here.

The Ace Children’s OT Back Office team provide all customers with a fast, effective and efficient service to make it seamless from enquiry to provision of services. We have dedicated administrators for finance, HR, assessment coordination, treatment delivery and e-learning.

All email enquiries are dealt with usually within 48 hours. If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

You can find out more about our team here.

The whole team of OTs, OTAs and OTTs follow ‘CPD’ training each month in line with the guidelines from HCPC and RCOT. Continuation of Professional Development is an essential part of maintaining skills and development.

The clinical team have direct supervision on a fortnightly or monthly basis dependent on working hours.

Our managing clinical director also has external supervision provided by 3 individual external OTs.

Our clinical team have also completed extensive e-learning courses on key areas such as safeguarding, prevent, manual handling, and first aid. These courses are completed every 2 years in line with RCOT and HCPC requirements.

The Ace Children’s OT management team are supported directly by an external consultant.

Our OT team has a high level of expertise in the delivery of EHC plan OT assessments. We are proud of the detailed OT assessment reports we produce, which can be used as evidence for EHC plan applications, reviews and tribunals.

Our designated Quality Assurance team ensure that all our OT assessment reports are ‘fit for purpose’ with a final clinical QA undertaken by a senior OT prior to sending to the customer. We aim for our reports to be written in ‘plain language’ and to be understood by all, with clearly defined goals, strategies and details of what OT provision is recommended.

We receive a lot of positive feedback from our customers regarding our detailed and thorough reports, which you can read here.

We are highly experienced in the provision of treatment sessions, annual review reports and programme writing. We use SMART targets and Goal Attainment Scales to produce evidence-based outcomes for all treatment programmes.

We can deliver bespoke training packages for schools. School training can be delivered in person or online. We also undertake INSET training days, with offerings ranging from 2-hour courses to whole day courses.

Examples of topics we can cover within the training sessions include:

• Gross motor skills
• Fine motor skills
• Handwriting development
• Zones of regulation and other self-regulation programmes
• Sensory processing difficulties
• Is it sensory or is it behaviour?
• Embedding functional skills into the curriculum.

Our courses can be tailor made so please don’t hesitate to ask if there are any other topics that you would be interested in our OTs covering in the staff training sessions.

We ensure that our business is up-to-date with current legislation such as GDPR and that we continue to meet all legal requirements for a therapy-based business; we hold ICO accreditation.

We provide our team with access to a directory of policies and procedures; the Clinical team undergo mandatory training annually, ensuring they are working to the latest mandatory standards.

HCC conducted a Safeguarding audit of our practice in 2022

We have a dedicated Safeguarding Lead, who introduces herself on our website here.

We continuously strive to deliver the best service that we can for our clients. We request feedback from our service users on a regular basis through NPS surveys.

Here are just a few of the recent comments we’ve received from our customers:

“Ace went above and beyond my expectations. I am extremely impressed with the quality of their assessments and report.”

“Very professional and helpful company and I would definitely recommend to anyone.”

“The booking process was straight forward and a lot of support was given to me. The OT who assessed my son was professional, kind and friendly.”

The whole Ace Children’s OT team are also involved in providing the management team with positive feedback as well as suggesting service improvements via a biannual team survey.