A sense of togetherness.

Byline: Jessica Mangold

Children at a Teesside primary school have spent the past six months helping design a complete overhaul of their playground.

Now the ambitious project at Sunnyside School, Coulby Newham, has been put forward to compete for an award in the Barclaycard/ Evening Gazette Making A Difference campaign.

Staff at the school, in Manor Farm Way, have been teaching special needs children with mainstream pupils for more than 25 years.

And teacher Sue Butler said: "We have special needs and mainstream pupils, but the playground has never been adapted.

"The children really want a sensory garden, where the kids with special needs wouldn't have to be worried about getting knocked over. For all the children it will be somewhere nice to rest and have a chat."

Plans for the garden include a "feely wall" for blind and partially-sighted pupils, developed for seven to 11-year-olds and later adapted for younger students.

* NOMINATIONS for a part of the pounds 30,000 awards being granted through the partnership between the Evening Gazette and Barclaycard have come in from other schools and educational schemes.

One application is from the Peripatetic Hearing Impaired Service through which teachers work with deaf pupils in mainstream schools.

The service, based at St Anthony's School, in Tranmere Avenue, Middlesbrough, is one of only five in the country, with a network of nine teachers.

Pauline Westgarth-Taylor heads up the service, and applied for a pounds 2,000 grant to fund speech therapy software, used to track students' work with therapists.

* THE Breakaway Children's Fund, at the Linthorpe Unit, in Carter Bequest Hospital, in Cambridge Road, Middlesbrough, organises holidays for physically disabled children taught with mainstream pupils.

For the past 11 years, the charity has paid for outward bound trips to the Lake District and is applying for help to fund the cost of youngsters and carers.

Breakaway student representative Jennifer Gallacher, 21, said: "This is a chance for youngsters to be with their peers, have fun and do what they want to do without disability affecting them.

"It is a real freedom for them."