Childhood First provide care, treatment and education to severely disturbed children and young people
08/01/2025
Happy New year everyone! ❤
Thank you so much for your ongoing support for Childhood first. We can't wait to see what this year brings for the charity! ⭐
We do have some places left in the Bath Half Marathon and the TTP Cambridge Half Marathon for 2025! If you're ready to take on a challenge this year, please check out our website and sign up!
Please do share with your family, friends & colleagues!
Transform young lives by taking part in a challenge event to raise funds for Childhood First. By committing to secure sponsorship for your endeavors, you will help us to transform the life chances of the children and young people in our care. You will help provide a rehabilitative and nurturing envi...
06/12/2024
There's only 5 days left of our Healing Hurt Minds Christmas Matched Funding Campaign ⭐
Please make your donations count - every donation between 3rd and 10th December will be DOUBLED!!😄
Hear from our lovely staff about the impact your donation could have on the children we support ❤
03/12/2024
Our 2024 Healing Hurt Minds Christmas Campaign is LIVE! ⭐
We are aiming to raise £70,000 to support the costs of Education & Recreation! From horse riding to gymnastics, football to ice skating, our children take part in a wide variety of after school and weekend clubs and activities.
This helps to build their confidence and self-esteem and supports them in developing trusting, healthy relationships outside of the homes.
Click below to donate today 👇 All donations between the 3rd and 10th December will be DOUBLED! ❤
Childhood First provides therapeutic residential care and education to 5-18 year old children, 100% of whom have experienced severe abuse, neglect and early-life trauma. We are hoping to raise £70,000
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Childhood First was founded almost a century ago to look after teenage boys who were breaking the law. At that time, such children were seen as either ‘mad or bad’. However, Childhood First came to understand that the young people invariably brought with them histories of family dysfunction, neglect, abuse and other trauma, which needed a deeper psycho-therapeutic approach if they were to be healed and rehabilitated.
Since those early days, we have become pioneering leaders in mental health care for traumatised children and young people. Healing the hurt minds and repairing the shattered lives of children who have experienced trauma or neglect requires special personal qualities combined with our unique approach. At the heart of this is our conviction that:
“The damage caused by relationships can most effectively be healed by relationships.”
Our mission is to dramatically improve life chances of these children and young people so that they can relate well to others, fulfill their potential and begin to enjoy life. Quite simply, without our intervention these children would be unable to thrive or have normal lives.
We achieve this by using a pioneering and uniquely effective approach called ‘Integrated Systemic Therapy’ which has been developed to meet the needs of the severely disturbed children referred to us over the past decade and a half. Our therapeutic staff training program, in which all care staff participate, is clinically accredited by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). This is a unique achievement in residential children’s care - all our children are looked after 24/7 by accredited psycho-therapeutic health care professionals.
We currently have four specialist therapeutic facilities which treat seriously emotionally and psychologically disturbed children referred from all over the UK. These communities in Kent and Norfolk offer a warm and caring environment where the child will feel secure and nurtured. Our ambition now is to grow the number of beds to meet the increasing need and we are planning to open a fifth community in 2020.
Childhood First also have continued to invest in family work. In 2018, we launched a unique therapeutic fostering service, where foster carers are trained and supported in the same way as our residential staff. Children who are not as emotionally and psychologically damaged as those in residential care will now have access to in-depth therapeutic support that can ensure their recovery from abusive and neglectful early life experiences. IST Fostering has just had it’s very first Ofsted inspection for which it received the highest possible rating.
A century and four different names
In 1973, the name of the charity was changed from Park House to Peper Harow, reflecting its changed location.
In 2005, the name of the charity was changed from the Peper Harow Foundation to Childhood First, reflecting again changed location and the development of our services to meet the needs of a new generation of children.
In 2017, we established ourselves as the Institute of Integrated Systemic Therapy to reflect the growing importance of our training, research and clinical development. This is now the umbrella name for the charity, though we still use the name Childhood First for communicating with Local Authorities.
We look forward with confidence to another century at least ‘redefining therapeutic care and education’.
