Downright Excellent – Enabling children with Down syndrome to maximise their potential

Downright Excellent (DEx) works with children, their families and their schools, combining fun learning activities, training, specialist therapies, peer support and socialising to form a circle of support around each child and family to support, empower and inspire.

“We are so grateful to have DEx – it is personalised, fun, varied, considerate, inclusive, and a highly unique service – thank you.”

What we do

We empower, inspire & support children with Down syndrome and their families – helping them to thrive.

“As soon as we started coming to DEx, we felt that we had found our community. The specialist interventions have enabled our daughter to develop more than we thought possible.”

DEx parent

Empower

Working with children with Down syndrome, from 0 to 18, we support them to develop their communication, social and life skills, enabling them to maximise their potential.

We do this through specialist sessions led by qualified practitioners who are experts in the unique learning profile of children with Down syndrome.

Inspire

We work with a wide range of professionals to enhance the support provided to children with Down syndrome and their families. We also provide training for teachers, teaching assistants and learning support assistants within schools, enabling school staff to focus on ‘ability’, rather than ‘limitations’.

Speech and Language Therapy students volunteer with us to practise their skills, taking away what they learn into their future careers.

Support

As well as providing a warm, caring community where parents, carers and siblings can come together to share experiences, we also provide families with tools and strategies to help empower themselves and their children. From baby sign language (Makaton) to enhance communication, through to bite-sized training to help families understand their child’s language, learning, sensory and motor needs, which supports the approaches we follow in our small group learning and therapy sessions, families are supported every step of the way.