Chapel House
Our first home, Chapel House in Gloucestershire. This is a three placement home, with every child/young person benefiting from having their own en-suite bathroom. The home also benefits from being in a rural environment, which means that children/young people are away from the influence of county lines gangs or child sexual exploitation and the negative impact this can have on their lives.
Residential Services
We believe strongly that young people should not be placed in large multi-bedded institutions but rather in homes that afford them a sense of attachment. At Fresh Start Care Group we have developed a flexible, inclusive and eclectic approach to meeting the needs of these young people.
Therefore, we ensure our homes are selected and furnished with the focus on providing a warm and nurturing environment in which they can flourish.
Our first home is the wonderful Chapel House, just outside the beautiful market town of Tewkesbury, in Gloucestershire. The homes within our services will range from single placement homes to multi placement homes, this is to ensure individual needs are met. However, as we strive to ensure that every young person’s needs are always met, our multi placement homes never have more than 3 children or young people living there at a time.
In all of our homes every young person will have a minimum of one carer working with them to ensure they have the support they need.
Every young person in our Residential Services is encouraged to participate in and attend education and gain essential life skills for their future. We will provide tutors, however we firmly believe that attendance at mainstream schools is more beneficial in the majority of cases and we support attendance to any suitable school or placement for that young person. We also encourage outdoor learning and engagement in the local community, ultimately ensuring that we provide fun and inclusion not just life skills.
Trust
The young people who come to Fresh Start Care Group will have often had difficult early experiences that are hard to make sense of. Very often, these challenges have been followed by multiple placement breakdowns.
By the time they reach us they may well have learned not to trust and have developed a whole range of strategies that are all about self-defence. They may find it hard to manage feelings, particularly anger and distress. They may find it hard to understand or care about what others may feel. They may think things have been their fault, that they are to blame for all that has happened. They may feel ineffective and not want to co-operate. They may want to attempt to control all aspects of their experience, and they may find it difficult to feel that they belong anywhere. They may not feel safe.
Insecurity
These types of difficulties are best understood in terms of attachment insecurity. At Fresh Start Care Group our goal is to promote attachment security and resilience. We do this by providing an integrated service in which all elements of the organisation, care, education and the clinical team, work together to provide a robust, thoughtful and nurturing environment that might enable more positive models of relationship, and promote a more positive view of themselves.
The Secure Base Model
In order to do all this effectively we use The Secure Base Model, developed by Professor Gill Schofield and Dr Mary Beek. By effectively targeting the five domains that are associated with attachment security we hope to make a positive, evidence based impact on the lives of our young people.
At Fresh Start Care Group, we build the ethos of our home on therapeutic parenting, that is parenting the children in a way which feels safe and helps them to make sense of their early experiences. Drawing upon the principles of Dyadic Developmental Practice (DDP) we aim to respond to the young people with PACE; Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy which will help to fill in the gaps of missed experiences and help them to develop an understanding of their history.
Each child is unique, and we don’t feel a generic assessment process would be in their best interest. Instead, each child will have a psychological formulation written by the consulting Clinical Psychologist who will draw together information from their early history together with the observations from the staff team. This will form the basis of our understanding of the young person, how their trauma has impacted them and how we as adults can work with them to help makes sense of their story and predict sources of stress and anxiety for them. Should the formulation highlight any further areas for assessment we may complete further psychometrics in house or refer them to the local CAMHS, OT or SaLT teams as necessary. Any assessment is a snapshot in time and each child will be discussed on a monthly basis in the team consultations provided by the Clinical Psychologist.
Fresh Start Care Group is passionate about providing therapeutic parenting and instilling the principles of DDP in all its staff. As such the basis of our intervention will be the relational care that each child receives from the adults in the home. Through the supervision provided by the consulting Clinical Psychologist members of staff may be supported to have difficult conversations with the young people and to engage them with short pieces of therapeutic work such as life story sessions. This is included in the placement fee. If it becomes apparent that a young person has more need for specific therapy, they may be seen directly by the consulting Clinical Psychologist. Although the approach may vary depending upon the young person’s needs, it will always draw upon the principles of DDP and relational trauma. These additional or alternative therapy services will incur an additional cost.
The qualifications, experience and supervision arrangements for adults in the home providing therapeutic health care can be found in Appendix B of our Statement of Purpose.
The consulting Clinical Psychologist can also provide input into the referral and matching process.
In addition to the in-house therapy provision, the home will build good working partnerships with the local Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) and those from neighbouring Local Authorities. The team will be made aware of CAMHS referrals and of treatment options offered by CAMHS.
Every young person in our Residential Services is encouraged to participate in and attend education and gain essential life skills for their future. We also encourage outdoor learning and engagement in the local community, ultimately ensuring that we provide fun and inclusion not just life skills.
For more information, or to enquire about available spaces, please contact us for more information. We will come back to you within 24 hours.
