British Summer Time ends on Sunday 25 October, and the evenings close in from there.
In a children’s home the darker months change the shape of a day. Less happens outside, more happens in the same few rooms, and the stretch between getting home and going to bed gets longer. For young people who find unstructured time difficult, that stretch is often where things get harder.
So the work in the next few weeks is mostly unglamorous: keeping mealtimes and bedtimes where they are, making sure there is something to do in the evening that is not a screen, getting out in daylight at the weekend, and noticing early when a young person’s sleep starts to slide.
Small homes help here too. With two or three young people in a house it is realistic to keep a predictable evening going, which is harder to do at scale. A week in one of our homes gives a sense of what that looks like.