National award win for Notts school
A Nottinghamshire school for children with special educational needs has won a prestigious national award – and an impressive ‘double-header’ of award wins.
Kedleston Group’s Wings School Notts, based near Newark, supports children with special educational needs including autism and social, emotional and mental health challenges.
Its innovative approach to physical activity took the top honour at the recent NASS (National Association of Special Schools) Awards in the Breaking Barriers and Inclusion category.
The school was honoured for its approach to using PE, sport and play to re-engage young people, many of whom face varying complex challenges, in their education.
And in an awards ‘double header’, the news comes just a few months after the school also won the Outstanding Inclusive Practice award at the Youth Sport Trust Conference 2025 Awards, for the same initiative.
Wings Notts is a Youth Sport Trust Lead Inclusion School and it aimed to adopt a unique approach to physical education, school sports and physical activity to provide young people with an improved and evidenced developmental experience.
Significant changes were made across their PE and school sport practices to support this vision, including implementing initiatives such as the Youth Sport Trust's My Personal Best and Inclusive Youth Leadership programmes which are led collaboratively by students and senior leadership.
They introduced daily health and well-being sessions, activity-based enrichments, uniform changes, dual national curriculums and the use of physical activity to aid regulation and de-escalation, and more. The initiatives have led to notable improvements for both students and staff, including an improved sense of belonging felt among the entire community, more young people are now regularly attending offsite sporting enrichments with trusted staff, and generally improved behaviour.
This award is the latest in a line of successes for the school, which was last year named as a Centre of Excellence by the Leadership Skills Foundation, one of only 17 centres achieving this prestigious accreditation, in the country.
Principal at the School Jacob Shelton said: “We are incredibly honoured and beyond delighted to have won this hugely prestigious award.
“We changed our entire approach to sports and physical education to be more inclusive so that everyone could engage at their own level of interest, motivation and pace. This has helped to remove barriers of ‘being the best’ or ‘being the worst’. Removing these barriers has opened the gates for a wider group of pupils to experience the life changing benefits of physical activity.”