Finalists in the UK’s longest-running, most prestigious awards for children’s activities providers, the National What's On 4 Kids Activities Awards have been announced! With Headline Sponsor Morton Michel and new Ceremony Sponsor TRE UK, Kelly Jenkins, and her team of franchise partners from Beaming Babies are amongst this year’s very special contenders.
These pioneering awards were established to showcase the UK's best children’s clubs, classes, leaders and volunteers – as nominated and voted for by the experts – parents and carers. Now in their 15th year, the 2021 event comes at a time when celebrating the value of this sector couldn’t be more relevant. Lockdown and the challenges COVID19 brought put unprecedented pressures on parents and children. It was a particularly difficult time for new parents who brought their babies into the world during this time, and they were deprived of many things that are taken for granted, such as family visits, baby classes, coffee dates with other new parents. With a desire to offer as much support as possible during the lockdown, Beaming Babies ran their classes online but not before hand delivering a resources kit to every single customer at their home to ensure they had everything they needed to take part in classes. Kelly Jenkins, founder of Beaming Babies, also set up a free support group on Facebook which was accessed by hundreds of new parents and their babies where she delivered free baby massage courses, story time sessions and conversation starters to help new parents connect.
This year, therefore, more than ever before these National awards are an important recognition of the crucial role children’s activities play in the lives of UK families – evidenced now as parents and children rush back to enjoy face to face, in-class sessions, further enhancing health, well-being and happiness.
Beaming Babies provides original story and sensory classes for babies from birth to 14 months supporting their natural holistic developing through magical and unique sensory experiences with classes available in Bridgend, Neath Port Talbot, Swansea, Llanelli and Carmarthen. It’s thanks to local support from customers who voted, Beaming Babies is officially a finalist in the Most Loved Baby Activity category. The 15th National What’s On 4 Kids Activities Awards will take place at the spell-binding Warner Bros. Studio Tour London – The Making of Harry Potter, where the ceremony will be held in the original Hogwarts TM Great Hall film set.
What’s On 4 Kids Managing Director, Sam Willoughby explains why this venue, this year…
“As soon as we launched the 2021 event we knew this was going to be a year like never before as parents raced to thank their children’s activities leaders with thousands of awards’ nominations. The wealth of hugely moving testimonials however, detailing the impact of activities during such challenging times inspired us to make the 2021 event even more special, to say thank you in a way never seen before. Thank goodness we work with some amazing businesses who felt the same way! We need to express our gratitude to each and every sponsor therefore for helping make this happen. We are beyond excited to be opening the doors to the original Hogwarts Great Hall film set in November for what will be an unforgettable evening for these very special guests and a celebration of the 15th year of these important awards”.
Parents and carers logged on to the What’s On 4 Kids website to cast a massive 45,000 nominations and votes to ensure that their ‘most-loved’ were in the running.
Kelly Jenkins from Beaming Babies said:
“We are absolutely delighted to have made it through to the finals of such a prestigious national award and really hope we can bring the win back to Wales! It’s all the more special knowing we got to this stage thanks to our customers voting for us so in that respect, we already feel like we’ve won!”
