Innovation in residential care

Last chance to prepare for adulthood:
Beech Tree House, Wrightington, Lancashire

If the philosophy of the Witherslack Group’s Beech Tree House children’s home could be summed up in two words, those words would be stability and challenge.

The home, which Ofsted included in its Outstanding Children’s Homes report last year, caters for eight- to 16-year-olds with emotional and behavioural needs. Most of these young people come to the home after a history of placement breakdowns, says Howard Tennant, director of care at Witherslack.

“We’re not the cheapest provision, so we’re taking youngsters who are at the extreme of the spectrum, who failed in many other placements before coming to us,” he says.

This sense of being a last resort drives the home’s willingness to challenge its residents. “We’re not just a babysitting service. Our task is not about containment or trying to make a home run smoothly or trouble-free,” says Tennant. “Perhaps it’s easier to do that, but we believe that for many of our youngsters this is their last chance and we would be doing them a disservice if we didn’t do everything possible to help them prepare for adulthood.”

Being challenging, he notes, is not about being confrontational or aggressive but “setting the boundaries, and sometimes saying ‘no’ and following through with actions”. But for this approach to work, the young people need to feel emotionally secure and that is where stability comes in. “We have low levels of staff turnover and a high level of staff stability is a key factor in helping the young people feel safe and secure, as they have often been let down in their lives ?by the transient nature of adults,” says Tennant.

Tennant says Beech Tree retains its staff by offering competitive salaries, investing in training and making the work rewarding. “We often talk about making an environment attractive to young people but we believe we also need to make it attractive to staff,” he says.

Catalyst to independent living:
Aidenswood, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire

As a home that specialises in working with boys who display harmful sexual behaviour, Aidenswood is by definition a setting with a difference.

Its six residents are drawn from across the British Isles. On average, they will stay for 26 months, undergoing a programme of therapy and education designed to curb their abusive behaviour and prepare them for life in the community.

Bob Bassett, registered manager of the Northern Care-owned home, calls its programme “intense”.

“It’s about a work ethic,” he explains. “The kids are pretty much working 15 hours a day. Those 15 hours might be their full-time education or very specific work with their key worker or their actual therapy. From day one they need to be learning everything they need to know for when they move on, hopefully to live independently.”

Aidenswood – unlike many homes – does not employ a cook or a cleaner. “We’ve done away with the classic staffing structure that you get in an emotional and behaviour disorder home, where you have a cook, a cleaner and a housekeeper,” explains Bassett. “We invested those peripheral salaries elsewhere to employ a second teacher. So while we have only six young men here there are two full-time teachers.”

Bassett says this helps stimulate the young people intellectually and also increases their chances of achieving good exam results and finding work after they leave. “It’s going to be difficult. They are going to go to job interviews and potentially disclose their history, which will put people off straight away,” he says. “But the more qualified they get, the more doors we can open and hopefully they can go to college or get a job and hopefully not reoffend.”

Aidenswood’s staffing decision also provides the home with another opportunity to build independent living skills. “They need to learn those skills, so the amount of competency my six young people have in terms of living skills is phenomenal,” says Bassett. “Every single one can make a proper Sunday roast for nine people. In other homes that wouldn’t happen as they’d employ a cook to do that.”

High aspirations from committed staff:
Elm Grove Children’s Home, Heckmondwike, Kirklees

Elm Grove Children’s Home is a residential local authority home in the small town of Heckmondwike in West Yorkshire. It caters for nine- to 17-year-old boys and girls with physical and learning difficulties or sensory impairments. Offering medium- to long-term residential placements, it featured in Ofsted’s Outstanding Children’s Homes report.

Claire Morgan, acting manager of the home, says a culture of high aspiration is key to Elm Grove’s success.
“We always go the extra mile and the staff are always willing to help out, which is something that Ofsted felt was quite prominent in the culture of the home,” she says.

“People are flexible and prepared to say ‘I’m okay to go and help with that or come in a little earlier or stay a bit later – it does help that the team is flexible and committed,” she says.

This flexibility allows Elm Grove to offer greater support to its eight young residents when they go outside of the home to attend school or their medical appointments.

“If we have a young person for whom we’re struggling to find an educational placement because of their very challenging behaviour, we do go into the school and work to help them maintain those placements,” says Morgan.

“We might introduce them slowly into the school environment and that might include having staff go there every lunchtime to offer support to the young person. It does stretch the team but I suppose we accept it as part of what we need to do.”

To help maintain Elm Grove’s “can-do” attitude, Morgan ensures she is working side-by-side with the rest of the team. “I’m out there with the team, I’m not an office-based manager,” she says.

“I will attend appointments with staff and the young people in various environments. When I see someone on the team who is passionate I look up to them myself and I want to be like that for my team and be there for them, just as the home’s previous manager was. It’s a culture that works and I’m working hard to maintain it.”

Preventative care for disabled children:
Cherry Lodge, Peterborough

Peterborough City Council’s Cherry Lodge children’s home is losing beds and regards this as a sign of success. It might be an unusual outlook but it is one rooted in the home’s preventative approach to residential care.

Cherry Lodge began life as a 21-bed home for under-19s with severe and complex disabilities, most of whom were placed in care voluntarily because their families were no longer able to provide them with the support they needed.

But now it has just four beds. Registered manager Claire Young says this is part of a decision to start offering short break and outreach services to families in the hope of staving off the need for residential care as long as possible.

“We were tasked with trying to prevent so many children coming into residential care and that’s why our short breaks service was set up to be needs-led, supportive and preventative,” she says. This support, coupled with the recent addition of outreach services that help families in their homes, has helped many children stay with their parents and siblings for longer.

“We know that some of these children may become shared care residential with us in the future but what we’ve done with our short break provision is to be able to delay that by two or three years,” says Young. Whereas children used to tend to become residents aged nine to 11, now they often enter care between 14 and 16.

The later entry into residential care makes transition planning very important to Cherry Lodge, which Ofsted rates as “outstanding”. “It’s not a walk in the park for the young people who are leaving us and we insist on doing very specific and very individual transition plans,” says Young. “Each young person should have an individual plan. You might have someone who is autistic – having too many settings in their life can be really disruptive so we do a lot of the groundwork with the providers they will be moving to.”

This transition preparation involves spreading the handover over weeks rather than days and regular meetings with the young person’s child and adult care co-ordinators to check that everything is moving in the right direction in case the transition plan needs to be revised. “We also do ‘shadow shifts’ where people from the new provider shadow what we what do in terms of outreach,” says Young.