The Attach service is a therapeutic team, made up of a range of professionals including:
- clinical psychology
- child and adolescent psychotherapy
- occupational therapy
Our work uses attachment, trauma and child development theory to understand the needs of children who have been neglected or abused and who no longer live with their birth parents.
We work with children, young people and their new families, as well as with the professionals who support them. We think about how best we can work together to meet children and young people’s needs and support their emotional wellbeing. Our aim is for children and young people to feel happy and secure in themselves and in their homes.
We also offer short-term assessments and therapeutic interventions for unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people. We recognise that these young people can feel especially lonely and stressed. We can offer our support in individual or group sessions, such as a therapeutic nature group, and offer translators to support good access to the sessions.
How we work with your social worker
Children and young people living in foster and special guardianship families and in residential children’s homes often have a big network of professionals supporting them. We always start our work by bringing this network together. Making sure that we understand all the different perspectives and how we can combine our efforts to provide the best support that we can.
Our mission: We foster therapeutic thinking and relational practice, building trust and collaboration across teams. By embedding a shared understanding of trauma, development, and emotional well-being, we help professionals respond to complex needs with confidence, compassion, and clarity.
We can provide regular reflective practice groups to social work professionals. These help them in their support to you and your family. We can also provide bespoke training for teams around children with a range of topics, such as:
- the impact of trauma on a child’s developing brain
- supporting staff to identify stress and burnout in themselves and colleagues
- how to develop and maintain supportive self-care routines
How we work with you
Before we meet with you, we send you some questionnaires to complete. This helps us begin to understand your difficulties. We will also carefully read the referral information including any information we have about your early life experiences before you came into care and since.
Following this we’ll meet for an assessment meeting where you will be able to tell us about the difficulties you are experiencing and what you would like to change. Sometimes our work is with carers only and sometimes with carers and children/young people. We will meet with you and your carer together or separately based on what we and you think will be most helpful.
Once we have met with you and developed a shared understanding of the difficulties your family is experiencing, we will discuss what we think is the best way for us to work with you.
Following our assessments we share our ideas and how we think we can help.
We offer a range of interventions and will talk with you about which of these we think would be most appropriate for you and what your goals for this work will be.