Rye Town Council has agreed to give a further grant of £1,200 to the local Music Well charity to enable children and young people in Rye to access sessions with a Health and Care Professions Council registered music therapist.
At the meeting on Monday January 28, the council had been told that “music therapy can be a particularly useful intervention as it works through a medium that young people find intrinsically interesting and expressive.
Through building a relationship using easily played instruments, problems and anxieties can be safely expressed and a positive outcome developed”.
On behalf of the charity John Hart said that demand at present currently exceeds supply, and while they were working with children with special needs at Rye College there were 14 on the waiting list now.
Before Rye College became part of a much larger group of academies (the Aquinas Trust), government inspectors (Ofsted) had commented on the number of children locally with special needs, and the need to meet those needs.
Special needs, which may include emotional and behavioural difficulties, can be linked to poverty, and St Mary’s (Rye’s parish church) magazine “The Pendulum” reports that the last Rye Food Bank session before Christmas fed 110 people from 26 local families and “pupils of the senior school of Rye College on their own initiative collected enough goodies for 26 Christmas hampers”.
Chris Emson, manager of Rye Food Bank, wrote that “most were suffering because of benefit delays due to the new Universal Credit scheme and we pray that will soon be sorted out”.
Pendulum also reports that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) report on poverty in 2018 said that, despite having a job, 4 million adults in the UK were living in poverty, and that in-work poverty was increasing faster than employment.
The JRF said this was because of low paid work (with little chance of progression), high housing costs, and weakening social security – but the government has said it will improve how the Universal Credit scheme works.
Image Credits: Rye News library .