Company Website: www.discovered.org.uk
Contact: Thomas Mayer
Position: Director and RI
Telephone: 07771 701629
Email: tom@discovered.org.uk

Type of Provision: Children’s residential care home, specialising in complex care requiring 2:1 staffing and solo settings.
Total number of children’s homes & other services: 1 children’s home split into two separate, self-contained, solo units.
Total number of registered beds: 2
Age range on admission: 10-18
Specialist services: Therapeutic care (trauma and attachment specialists). Our young people often have multiple challenges, including trauma and attachment issues. We do a lot of work with DOLS orders, self-harm, etc.
Other education provision: We work with local schools, tutors, etc. to help facilitate whatever education a young person needs, though many who come to us have been out of full-time education for years and are often tutored in the home.
Therapeutic provision: We work with a select few consultant therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health nurses to help ensure that each young person has access to a full range of appropriate assessments and interventions.

Our mission is to provide the very best therapeutic residential care and education possible to children with complex needs. By employing an unwavering child-centred approach in all that we do, we aim to provide every child with a stable base where they receive the care and attention they deserve, in order to begin to form secure attachments. Furthermore, by fostering a therapeutic environment at both home and school, we provide our young people with a safe space to develop both cognitively and socially.

Our therapeutic model is trauma-informed and calls on whatever therapeutic input is most relevant for each individual (e.g. OT, CBT, play therapy, etc.) to address the many cognitive, emotional, behavioural and interpersonal effects of the trauma they have suffered. We combine this with the Secure Base model of care-giving, which is “a positive framework for therapeutic care-giving, which
helps infants, children and young people to move towards greater security and builds resilience. It focuses on the interactions that occur between care-givers and children on a day-to-day, minute by minute basis, in the home environment. But it also considers how those relationships can enable the child to develop competence in the outside world of school, peer group and community.”

Weekly therapy sessions are available for the young people who need them. Irrespective of the individual therapeutic needs, therapeutic training is provided to all staff by a select few therapists closely associated with the home.