Placement Support is a multi-disciplinary team combining specialists with wide experience of working and living with vulnerable children and families. Our expertise includes psychotherapy, social-work, and education, with particular focus on the way children and those who care for them live together. We provide support through face-to-face and on-line work. Our on-line services have been in operation for more than five years and are highly regarded.
Our work promotes sustaining relationships between children and the adults involved with them. We work with birth, adoptive, and special guardianship families and with schools and children's homes. Our expertise helps make sense of the ways that early adverse experience can hamper children getting on with their lives. We assist carers and other professionals to communicate with children and to understand the meanings of their behaviour and its underlying causes. This sense-making improves relationships and enables difficulties to be overcome. Our aim is to create conditions in which we can be proud of the achievements of our children, rather than worried about the next thing that might happen.
We also provide consultancy and specialist training for carers and professional networks. Our training is accredited through APPCIOS - Association for Psychodynamic Practice and Counselling in Organisational Settings.
We are an Ofsted registered Adoption Support Agency and member of CASA.
Why we do it
Caring for children who don’t always want to be cared for can be a bewildering experience, and it can be hard to find the right kind of help. Often, looked-after and adopted children present problems that are not easy to understand or to categorise, so while looking after traumatised and abused children can be deeply rewarding, it can also be one of the most difficult jobs there can be.
No-one should underestimate the difficulties of this work, and the impact that these vulnerable children can have on everyone around them: their peer group, their teachers, their adoptive and foster parents and the professional networks that try to help them.
These are children who come from troubled and disrupted families that could not hold together in a loving and cohesive way. Because of their early experiences, they find it hard to trust the adult world. They need a network of adults around them, thinking about them together and making sense of their scattered memories, if they are to overcome the emotional damage caused by early neglect, disruption, chaos or abuse.
We work with families, carers, staff groups, social workers and teachers as well as offering direct work to the children. We stress the importance of building a joined-up and cohesive understanding amongst all the adults who contribute to the care of the children.