The Chamwell Centre

• Local Offer

Our facilities are available to The Milestone School and SAND Academy pupils together with children and adults with disabilities throughout Gloucestershire.

Families are also welcome to use our facilities, where they can enjoy various activities with their able bodied and disabled children in the hydrotherapy pool, soft-play and discovery areas.

We work closely with clinicians, care professionals, the NHS and local authorities to offer our facilities to the wider community.

Our aim is to provide a visionary and unique centre to enable pupils of The Milestone School and SAND Academy, along with children, young people and adults throughout Gloucestershire to overcome disability.

Our History
The Chamwell Centre derives its name from the Chamwell School, which was Gloucester’s special school for children with physical disability and stood on the present Milestone School site until 1997, when three schools were amalgamated.

The resulting Milestone School, rated ’Outstanding’ by Ofsted, is now one of the largest special schools in the country with over 320 pupils, all with severe and complex additional needs.

Further Expansion
A further expansion came when three other special schools joined Milestone to form the SAND Academy in 2019, for another 200 children with additional needs. In 2015, the large hydrotherapy pool, on which the school relied, became unsafe and needed to be replaced. The site also lacked suitable facilities for play, physical activities and social opportunities for its pupils. A little research showed that the problem was much wider than that, with a general lack of suitable facilities in Gloucestershire for recent school leavers and adults with complex additional needs. After wide consultation, plans were drawn up for The Chamwell Centre to be built on The Milestone campus.

Experienced team and specialists
A dedicated group of trustees, each bringing specialist knowledge and experience, formed a charity and launched an appeal which eventually resulted in £5.1 million being raised to build a visionary and unique resource for the people of Gloucestershire. Chamwell was designed to cater for the needs of the pupils of The Milestone School and The SAND Academy during school hours but at all other times, to be a resource for all in the Community who can benefit from its services.

Our Plans for the Future

We have a state-of-the-art building, which is now coming alive with all the wonderful people who are enjoying being part of this groundbreaking project. Chamwell’s challenge now is to ensure that it meets the needs of The Milestone School, SAND Academy and all those with complex additional needs in the County of Gloucestershire.

This is their building. The generous benefactors who made it possible, made their donations so that everyone, no matter what their degree of difficulty, could access sports, leisure, therapies, and play in a spirit of friendship and equality.

Coming together after a challenging time
Our launch has been shakier than we would have hoped, because of the Covid pandemic but despite this, great strides have been made and we plan to forge ahead with plans for more adapted sports and therapies, more social opportunities, youth groups, clubs, music, dance, theatre/ accessible chair yoga and many more activities, always being guided by the wishes of the Chamwell users themselves.

Our short breaks programme is just beginning but will be developed over the coming months to offer exciting opportunities for children and young people to access all the exciting activities which Chamwell can offer, whilst being cared for by our staff.

We shall be building on our current therapy staff to increase our ability to offer professional supervision for therapies and adapted sports.

A positive future to build upon
The possibilities for Chamwell are endless. We are in uncharted territory because there are no other Centres like Chamwell – we are the pioneers of a new concept in caring and meeting the needs of all those with complex additional needs in our community.

By means of our research, our focus groups, our wide network of contacts and professionals, we plan to develop the Chamwell Centre so that it truly reflects and fulfils the needs of the community which it serves.