Financial support helps put York’s soap opera at the forefront of early years learning

A SOAP opera developed by a York company to provide a way of learning for early years workers has been given a £30,000 boost from the Yorkshire Innovation Fund (YIF).

The drama-based learning programme, based on a fictional soap opera set in a small day nursery, was developed in September 2013 by Sue Overton Associates to support managers and supervisors through the introduction and development of staff supervisions.

The programme takes characters first developed by company founder Sue Overton and her team for a one-off residential weekend course for nursery leaders, and places them in a range of situations and settings within an ongoing storyline.

She said that the £30,000 YIF award from York St John University will enable the company to undertake vital research to help establish the value of drama-based learning and take the programme to the next level.

Her aim is to give the programme vital credibility that will encourage other organisations to rethink the way they develop employees.

Sue Overton Associates earlier received over £4500 of first round funding to support a Small Innovation Project (SIP), which allowed them to review platforms which would take their face to face practises online.

Jenny Hall, creative business development manager at York St John, sits on the Yorkshire Innovation Fund awards panel on behalf of the University. She said this latest award takes the total York St John has given out under the YIF scheme to £120,000 and says Sue’s learning programme is precisely the kind of initiative the programme was set up to support.

York St John University has awarded YIF financial support to projects across Yorkshire, including those in the creative, manufacturing learning, product design and business development sectors. The YIF fund is available for priority sectors for R&D and innovation projects, until July 2015.

YIF is an initiative of eleven Yorkshire and Humber universities, a partnership part-financed by the ERDF. It gives Yorkshire and Humber SMEs in priority and eligible sectors access to the collective expertise of the region’s universities.

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