Activities at St James' Church

St James’ Church accommodates a number of activities, detailed below.

• Adult Education Classes
• St James Men’s Group – Tuesdays 11am till 2pm
• Pre-School Playgroup – no longer running

Adult Education Classes

During the year a range of Adult Education Classes run at St James. These often include embroidery, dress making, keep fit.

Ask Jackie Burton at St James for details of the courses taking place at the moment.

St James Men's Group

The St James Men’s Group provides the opportunity for games, conversation and refreshments, and is open to anyone from the local community.

The group now meets on Tuesdays during the day time, from 11 am to 2pm, in the Meeting Room at St James Church. The group used to meet on a monthly basis on a Thursday evening, but in order to attract new members and provide something for the local community, the decision was made to move to a weekly meeting and switch to the daytime.

Pre-School Playgroup

After some 30 years of serving the local community, the St James Pre-School Play Group closed in July 2008. Despite heroic attempts at fund-raising, changes in funding of voluntary sector organisations like ours in poor inner-city area meant that the Play Group was no longer financially viable, even though there was an extremely long waiting list for places.

Our playgroup ran every weekday in school term-time with 20 preschoolers, ably looked after by our 3 qualified Nursery Staff. Our children came from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, e.g. Bengali, Pakistani, Nigerian, Kosovan etc., and faith communities. And of course, they each had their own personalities and interests.

We have enjoyed excellent relationships with many organisations who helped us with children with Special Needs; The Pre-School Learning Alliance, SENCO (Special Educational Needs), and Birmingham City Council (who are also our main funders), Speech Therapists, and Educational Psychologists.