Getting school ready with the Keiki Island Kids

Following the school closures required to reduce the spread of Covid-19 we are facing an unprecedented difficultly in September when thousands of four year old's will start primary school without being school ready. Due to social distancing it is predicted that children will experience unusually high levels of attachment anxiety, lack of physical readiness such as coordination skills and toileting and an increased difficulty in pro-social and educational attainment skills like concentration and turn taking. This is of serious concern as School readiness is shown to provide the foundations for a child's education with the school readiness gap at five years old explaining 40 per cent of the attainment gap at the end of secondary school.

Due to the pandemic an innovative digital approach is needed to try and replace the school transition work that would have been completed during the build up to the summer and lessen the school readiness gap. We will create a high quality animation for children, explaining the process of transition and replacing the work that would have been completed in nursery settings as well as a number of downloadable resources for parents and which can be sent out by schools to consolidate the learning. These will sit as part of our innovative platform, Embers the Dragon, which uses a blend of creative expertise and clinical expertise to create child development programs that can scale at mass.

All of the resources included in the package are written by clinical and educational experts and underpinned by current best practice and evidence. With no digital school readiness program available in the UK this project will be essential to ensuring there is not a secondary crisis of childhood development as a result of Covid-19

---ADDITIONAL INFORMATION HERE---
Whilst our initial program had over 480,000 engagements the ongoing impact of Covid-19 on children's emotional wellbeing means that it is imperative that we extend the scope of the program to cover Skills for School across the year, not just when starting school. This reflects that children will continue to experience unexpected school closures, periods away from classroom teaching and disruption to the peer group. Building on the success of our initial scope we will extend the resources available for parents when supporting children at home, adding additional resources to the three core areas of physical, emotional and social skills to ensure children continue to develop core skills like emotional regulation, fine motor skills, independence and confidence and to ensure that disruption caused by Covid-19 is kept to a minimum