Looked After Children & Adoption Services
Within our Looked After Children and Adoption services, we aim to enhance psychological understanding of need, support positive change, and overall have a meaningful impact within the lives of young people and those who support them.
We specialise in supporting a range of provisions including foster care and adoption services, residential care and services supporting care-experienced young people. We value adopting a person-centred approach, where we work alongside services to promote the health and wellbeing of children and young people.
We aim to collaboratively work alongside Looked After Children’s provisions to develop a bespoke package of support dependent on the individualised needs of the service.
This can include offering:
To gain a shared, holistic understanding of a young person’s strengths and needs. This would typically include understanding their story and tentatively making sense of how their early experiences may have influenced their belief systems (about themselves, others, and the world), what their current patterns of coping may be and how this may shape the behaviours that we see. This shared understanding would then guide the therapeutic support offered to the young person.
To provide a space to explore the needs and challenges of supporting young people, including intervention planning, safeguarding, and risk management. We draw upon psychological theory and guidelines, including attachment and trauma informed principles, to guide thinking and offer clinical recommendations and support. Following all consultation meetings, clear recommendations are documented and sent to services.
Allow for the facilitation of multi-agency meetings to consider multiple complex needs. This can provide an opportunity for professionals to reflect on individualised need, allow space for shared understanding and processing feelings such as frustration or stuck-ness. From here, multi-agency decisions can be considered, and clinical recommendations offered.
Tailored to individualised service need can also be offered. This can include specific training on attachment and trauma or therapeutic approaches, such as therapeutic parenting.
For senior management to enhance strategic planning, service delivery and clinical practice through promoting psychological understanding at individual, team, and organisational levels.
- Therapeutic frameworks of care: It is essential that support offered to young people is tailored based on psychological evidence and theory, such as drawing from attachment and trauma informed approaches. We support services to develop unique therapeutic frameworks that clearly articulate the support offered within a service.
- Outcomes frameworks and evaluation: We recognise the importance of ensuring that service delivery is regularly evaluated, and outcomes are monitored. Therefore, we work with services to develop tailored outcomes frameworks that detail this process and how such data will shape future service delivery.
