Services
Consultations
There are several types of consultation packages:
- Consultations for Adoptive and foster families: Consultations can be a cost-effective way of helping more adoptive and foster families with less financial resources. This package has been trialled with a Local Authority and it seems to work well where families are given three consultations sessions for one focus child and an additional session for each additional child. These sessions help the family gain a better understanding of the child’s difficulties and strategies of how to cope with difficult behaviour or concerns. Consultations sessions are once a month and three families are seen in one day
- One-off or once a month consultation sessions for Social workers, residential workers and other professionals to consider the needs of children or young people or what constitutes therapeutic care in residential settings
Training
Training can be one-off workshops on a particular topic or a block of workshops or a particular course. Topics could include:
- Introduction to complex trauma/attachment difficulties (for professionals and carers/parents)
- 12-week attachment-based parenting course for adoptive parents and foster carers
- How to manage young people with attachment difficulties in school
- Dealing with anger and aggressive behaviour
- Anxiety and attachment difficulties
- Building self esteem and resilience
Assessment
It can be useful to gain an understanding of a child/young person’s functioning and strategies to manage concerns or difficult behaviour. The shape of the assessment depends on what is needed, but they typically include:
- Reading of background documents
- Professionals meeting
- Session with the foster carer/residential key worker or adoptive parent
- Sessions with the child/young person
- A family session (if applicable)
- Questionnaire measures
- Report
Therapeutic packages
Short-term therapeutic support (14 weeks) provides:
- Engaging the child/young person
- Feelings work – helping the child/young person to acknowledge, label and understand their feelings a little better
- Explain the impact of trauma, abuse and neglect
- Making links between feelings and the child/young person’s life story (as much as they can manage in short-term work)
- A more in-depth understanding of the child/young person’s functioning and their therapeutic needs
- School meeting
- Suggestions on how to manage the young person’s needs
- Sessions model to the carer/parent how to talk to the child about difficult things
Longer-term therapeutic packages
Longer-term packages are best suited to children/young people with more complex needs. A package could consist of all or some of the following:
- Weekly therapy for the child/young person
- Weekly or fortnightly support for adoptive parents/foster carers/key worker
- Review meetings to consider progress and a progress report
- Meetings with the school
- Attendance at Children In Care Review meetings
- Therapeutic maintenance sessions – once completing long-term work families often need a meeting every few months as a check-in which helps maintain progress