Our care
Care built around each child.
Care is tailored to each child’s assessed needs and placement plan. Each home page explains the approaches its own team is trained to use.
An approach built around one child.
Care is tailored to each child’s assessed needs and placement plan. Each home page explains the care approaches its team is trained to use and any specialist or therapeutic input actually available.
The approach asks the adults around a young person to look past behaviour to the experience driving it, to stay regulated when a young person cannot, and to repair the relationship afterwards. Where a team works this way it shapes ordinary moments - a meal, a bedtime, a disagreement about school - far more than it shapes any timetabled session.
What an individual home is trained to use, and what specialist or therapeutic input is genuinely available there, is set out on that home’s own page rather than claimed for every home at once.
PACE - what it asks of an adult.
PACE is a way of being with a young person rather than a technique applied to them. Four ideas, used together.
Playfulness
Lightness where it helps - keeping a relationship warm, so that harder conversations have somewhere to land.
Acceptance
Accepting the feeling underneath the behaviour, even when the behaviour itself cannot be accepted.
Curiosity
Wondering aloud about what is going on for a young person, instead of assuming we already know.
Empathy
Staying alongside a young person in a hard moment, so they do not have to manage it on their own.
Working with therapists
Stephen Henshaw of Shell’s Space Counselling, a Preston counselling and psychotherapy practice, works alongside us. Where clinical support is available to a team it means staff are not holding a young person’s emotional, social and psychological needs on their own. What is available at a particular home, and how it is delivered, is on that home’s page.
What that looks like depends on the child. With younger children a lot of the work happens through play, which lets them approach difficult feelings at a safe distance and without shame. With teenagers it rests on being understood rather than judged, and on knowing what is confidential and what is not. The aim either way is the same: the young person leaves a session feeling lighter, and better able to manage the moment that would once have overwhelmed them.
Therapeutic input is arranged around each young person’s plan rather than offered as a fixed package. Ask our referral team what would be put in place for a particular placement and which professionals would be involved.
Registered in-house trainers in de-escalation and positive handlingTeam Teach - de-escalation first.
Team Teach is the positive behaviour approach we train staff in, and its emphasis is on preventing a crisis rather than responding to one. We hold registered in-house trainers, and each home page states what its own team is trained to use.
De-escalation comes first
The overwhelming majority of Team Teach is about reading early signs, lowering demands and giving space - long before anything physical.
Physical intervention is a last resort
Any physical intervention must be reasonable and proportionate, and used only to keep people safe. De-escalation comes first.
Every incident is debriefed
Staff and young people both reflect afterwards: what happened, what was felt, and what would help next time.
Oversight and recording
Incidents are recorded and reviewed by the registered manager, so patterns are noticed and practice changes.
Contact us or make a referral.
Talk to our referral team about whether one of our homes is the right fit for a young person you are placing. Our referral line is open 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, and we take planned placements only.