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Back on Track Children's Services Ltd acknowledge that moving to a new home and in any cases a new area can often be a traumatic and difficult experience for young people and their families. Commitment is the Key Word at Back on Track as we believe these Young People deserve a consistent, stable and safe environment to work through their difficulties, with full support from all staff members at Back on Track.
Our admission procedure has been designed with the young people at the centre of it to minimise as much trauma as possible and reduce anxieties for the young people and their families.
It is no good just placing (containment) a young person within a residential setting and hope it will all somehow work out. These young people have extremely complex psychological and therapeutic needs which are imperative to be addressed and be dealt with by the appropriate professionals here at Back on Track.
At Back on Track we understand that all children have the opportunity and the right to be cared for after all they only have one childhood. We are committed to ensuring the care they receive is fulfilling and rewarding in preparation for their adulthood lives. Preparing for Independence is a key feature of the care we offer Young People, which starts from day 1 to ensure the Young Person leaves Back on Track with all the necessary skills for adulthood.
Our primary aim is to keep young people in a safe and stable environment by confronting anti¬social or self-destructive behaviours thereby enabling the development of alternative ways of self-expression whilst creating opportunities for young people to establish and maintain trust, raise self-esteem and develop respect for themselves and others.
Back on Track offers a quality of life that is as close to a family environment as can be achieved without the added emotional pressures of being placed with a substitute family. We do not believe in replicating "institutional settings" and to the casual observer our home is a "normal" domestic type environment.
Our Work
We are aiming to achieve the five ingredients of a therapeutic culture model devised by Rex Haigh to structure our understanding of our work. This model states:
"The five ingredients of a therapeutic culture and are seen as a developmental sequence: from the earliest experience of attachment to maternal and paternal aspects of containment, and the task to make contact with others in a way which allows intimate and mutative communication to happen. Then on to the adolescent struggle of involvement and finding one's mutual responsibilities amongst others, and finally to an adult empowered position of agency – finding the self which is the seat of action and from which true personal power and effectiveness must come".
(Haigh, Rex: The Quintessence of the Therapeutic Environment)
These five ingredients provide a developmental model that helps us in understanding the steps that we are working towards here at Back on Track for each young person placed at Walmer House.
All our staff at Back on Track follows the five fundamental outcomes of every child matters
- Be healthy
Thus enjoying a good physical lifestyle, promoting and maintaining good mental health.
- Stay safe
Being protected from harm and neglect & being taught the skills to be able to look after themselves.
- Enjoy and achieve
By getting the most out of their life and education enabling them to develop their skills for adulthood.
- Make a positive contribution
To their local community and not being misled in to participating in anti-social behavior.
- Achieve economic well-being
Being encouraged to engage in further education, employment or training on leaving school, ensuring they will be ready for employment. To be able to live in a decent home and a sustainable community thus enabling them to live in a household free.
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