Latest news with #childrenshome
BBC News
a day ago
- General
- BBC News
Neighbours object to new Swindon private children's home
Residents of a cul-de-sac have criticised what they say was a lack of consultation over the opening of a new children's Borough Council gave permission for the property to be changed from a dwelling to a business in May, a process that does not need public has no council-run facilities and relies on private children's homes to accommodate children needing residential care at an average cost of £7,000 per week per children's home, which is not being named to protect those it takes care of, said it ran an open day where neighbours were invited to meet the staff, view the property and air concerns but nobody attended. 'Building relationships' Co-founders of the new home, Amanda and Alicia, said building a relationship with neighbours is important for the young people living in the facility, and that they wouldn't give up trying to make said: "We want to build a relationship with our neighbours for us but more so for that child can have that relationship with their neighbours."They may be friends with their children, they may go to the same school. We want them to live in a beautiful street, in a beautiful house just like your child or mine."Once the new home has been officially approved, the first resident with be a 16-year-old girl, whose interests have been worked into the decoration of the property. A group of neighbours, who wished to remain anonymous, spoke to the BBC, with one saying he was worried about anti-social behaviour, "spilling onto the street".The man added that in his personal experience, some children living in homes like this can "fly off the rails".Another neighbour shared concerns for the safety of property adding: "it's a housing cul-de-sac, it affects everybody in many different ways." The two women opening the new facility said looked-after children do experience "stigmatisation", but added they do not believe such beliefs are malicious, but more from "not knowing".When people hear the phrase "children's home", they added, they often think the young people will have drug, alcohol or behavioural issues but "that's not often the case".The two women say they have 30 years of experience in social care settings and have hand picked their "highly trained" staff who will be ever-present at the property."We will be there with them day in, day out to live a normal life just as they deserve," Amanda added. The neighbours who spoke to the BBC said they also have concerns about limited parking for the 17 houses on the cul-de-sac, saying parking issues are already causing "high tensions".The care home management admitted that when they were moving in there were "a few cars on the drive and on the street" but that in the long term they would be encouraging staff to park out of the area and walk to work. No public consultation is required before private residential care facilities are opened.A certificate of lawfulness must be issued by the local authority allowing the property to be changed from a dwelling to a business, and the facility needs to be approved by Borough Council has said it pays an average of £7,000 a week per child to private children's home to care for looked- after latest private facility said it will charge the council at cost with reported "small profits" being spent on extra benefits for the children in their cabinet member for children's services, Paul Dixon, said: "We have plans to create our own in-house accommodation placements in Swindon and, if this is a success, we will look to expand that further, creating additional places for children and young people within the Borough."A proposal will be going before cabinet on this in the next few months."
BBC News
3 days ago
- General
- BBC News
Kirkleatham Church View children's home praised by Ofsted
A children's home has been praised by inspectors for its "outstanding leadership and strong support", an inspection has View Children's Home in Kirkleatham, near Redcar, was rated as "good" overall after Ofsted inspectors visited in May and June. The home, which is owned and managed by Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council, was judged good at building trust with children and keeping them secure and Laura Wedgewood, who was praised in the inspection, said the work was "stressful" but "so rewarding". She said: "When you feel you've made that difference to a young person, well, it's a wonderful feeling." The home provides residential care for up to six children with social, emotional or mental health difficulties and four were living there at the time of the described the overall experiences and progress of residents and the support and protection offered as "good", while the effectiveness of leadership and management as "outstanding."Ms Wedgewood was praised for her proactive and collaborative approach, with the report stating: "The manager has built highly effective working relationships with other professionals involved in the children's lives. "She ensures that all professionals are acting in the best interests of children and challenges appropriately when plans are not being progressed." Inspectors highlighted the strength of communication with families and professionals, as well as children benefitting from trusted relationships with staff who provide emotional support and a sense of belonging. The home's outreach work was also commended, with parents valuing the support provided and reporting improved relationships with their said children are helped to understand risks such as substance abuse, exploitation and extremism. When children go missing, "staff act swiftly and coordinate with relevant agencies to ensure their safe return", the report said. Councillor Bill Suthers, cabinet member for children and families, said: "One of the real positives of 'in-house' care by the council's own dedicated professionals within our borough is it can help maintain a child's relationship with their own communities and families when appropriate."That can have enormous benefits for a child." Follow BBC Tees on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Anti-social behaviour concerns over impact of new building at children's home
Anti-social behaviour has been cited as a possible concern as councillors considered a planning application. Weymouth Town Council's Planning and Licensing Committee heard that residents in Wyke Regis are concerned about proposals to 'erect an outbuilding in the rear garden of a property in the area to be used in connection with the authorised use of the site as a children's residential home.' An email sent by Cllr Gill Taylor was read out to the meeting. It said: 'I have had a resident concerned about the following application. This property is managed by children's services and houses young people who need a high level of support. There have been problems with anti-social behaviour from the residents in the past which sounds to me may have not been well managed. 'I have been told that there's a well-used lane behind where they are intending to put the building and on the other side of the lane is an outbuilding where the young person uses a drum kit.' According to planning documents, the children's' residential home provides attachment and trauma-informed care to one child or young person aged 7-17. The proposed building would be located in the rear garden area of the property and would have dimensions of 4.19m x 3.28m with a maximum height of 2.5m. It would replace an existing outbuilding in the rear garden area as shown on the block plan. The proposed outbuilding will be used to support the child in the care of the client on site, to recover from the impacts of adversity, trauma, abuse and neglect and if approved would create a separate space from the living environment for 'teaching' of the on-site resident. The building would not be used to 'house' additional children but to improve services on offer to the child on site to aid their care and support. Cllr Simon Clifford said: 'My view is that we have got no scope to do anything to reject this but perhaps make a comment saying make sure that noise is kept to a minimum or something along those lines.' Cllr Jon Orrell added: 'I agree that we wouldn't want to reject this as it's important that children are looked after and have a bit of space. It does seem to be quite a decent sized plot. Make sure it's approved with conditions such as being well-monitored and sound proofed. 'It's quite helpful that they have a sensory room for children with disturbed behaviour because they can get away from the situation and calm down – so in many ways it ought to be a means of improving the situation rather than making it worse.' Weymouth Town Council supported the planning application, but commented that 'the home needs to be aware of its responsibilities to its local neighbourhood, including disturbance, anti-social behaviour and noise.' Dorset Council will have the final say on the application.
Yahoo
18-07-2025
- General
- Yahoo
On this day: Great Horton's Francis House reopens as children's home
On this day in 2015, the Telegraph and Argus reported that a newly refurbished children's home had opened in Bradford to support young people with learning disabilities. The facility, Francis House, on Hollybank Road in Great Horton, was reopened by Christian charity Catholic Care after nine months and £70,000 worth of renovation, marking the first children's home opened by the charity "for around 20 years." Carol Hill, director of Catholic Care, said at the original time of reporting in 2015: "We have had the home since the 1970s, but we've given it a new lease of life as there was a great need for a service for children with learning disabilities, particularly those with autism." The home was to cater for "up to six children, aged six to 17" with some form of learning difficulty, such as autism. The refurbished facility included bedrooms, a playroom, a chill-out room, and an enclosed garden with trampolines, slides, and a splash pool. Then-Lord Mayor of Bradford, councillor Joanne Dodds, officially opened the home on July 17, 2015. More information about Catholic Care is available at
Yahoo
13-07-2025
- Yahoo
How hundreds of Irish babies came to be buried in a secret mass grave
No burial records. No headstones. No memorials. Nothing until 2014, when an amateur historian uncovered evidence of a mass grave, potentially in a former sewage tank, believed to contain hundreds of babies in Tuam, County Galway, in the west of Ireland. Now, investigators have moved their diggers onto the nondescript patch of grass next to a children's playground on a housing estate in the town. An excavation, expected to last two years, will begin on Monday. The area was once where St Mary's children's home stood, a church-run institution that housed thousands of women and children between 1925 and 1961. Many of the women had fallen pregnant outside of marriage and were shunned by their families - and separated from their children after giving birth. According to death records, Patrick Derrane was the first baby to die at St Mary's – in 1915, aged five months. Mary Carty, the same age, was the last in 1960. In the 35 years between their deaths, another 794 babies and young children are known to have died there - and it is believed they are buried in what former Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Enda Kenny dubbed a "chamber of horrors". PJ Haverty spent the first six years of his life in the place he calls a prison - but he considers himself one of the lucky ones. "I got out of there." He remembers how the "home children", as they were known, were shunned at school. "We had to go 10 minutes late and leave 10 minutes early, because they didn't want us talking to the other kids," PJ said. "Even at break-time in the school, we weren't allowed to play with them – we were cordoned off. "You were dirt from the street." Read more from the survivors, relatives and campaigners who helped reveal the secret of Tuam after a decades-long wait for the truth. The stigma stayed with PJ his whole life, even after finding a loving foster home and, in later years, tracking down his birth mother, who was separated from him when he was a one-year-old. The home, run by the nuns of the Bon Secours Sisters, was an invisible spectre that loomed over him and many others in Tuam for decades – until amateur historian Catherine Corliss brought St Mary's dark past into the light. Interested in delving into her family's past, Catherine took a local history course in 2005. Later, her interest turned to St Mary's and the "home children" who came to school separately from her and her classmates. "When I started out, I had no idea what I was going to find." To begin with, Catherine was surprised her innocuous inquiries were being met with blank responses or even suspicion. "Nobody was helping, and nobody had any records," she said. That only fed her determination to find out more about the children at the home. A breakthrough came when she spoke to a cemetery caretaker, who brought her to the housing estate where the institution once stood. At the side of a children's playground, there was a square of lawn with a grotto – a small shrine centred on a statue of Mary. The caretaker told Catherine that two boys had been playing in that area in the mid-1970s after the home was demolished, and had come across a broken concrete slab. They pulled it up to reveal a hole. Inside they saw bones. The caretaker said the authorities were told and the spot was covered up. People believed the remains were from the Irish Famine in the 1840s. Before the mother-and-baby home, the institution was a famine-era workhouse where many people had died. But that didn't add up for Catherine. She knew those people had been buried respectfully in a field half a mile away - there was a monument marking the spot. Her suspicion was further raised when she compared old maps of the site. One, from 1929, labelled the area the boys found the bones as a "sewage tank". Another, from the 1970s after the home was demolished, had a handwritten note next to that area saying "burial ground". The map did seem to indicate there was a grave at the site – and Catherine had read the sewage tank labelled on the map had become defunct in 1937 so, in theory, was empty. But who was buried there? Catherine called the registration office for births, deaths and marriages in Galway and asked for the names of all the children who had died at the home. A fortnight later a sceptical member of staff called to ask if she really wanted them all – Catherine expected "20 or 30" - but there were hundreds. The full list, when Catherine received it, recorded 796 dead children. She was utterly shocked. Her evidence was starting to indicate who was likely to be underneath that patch of grass at St Mary's. But first, she checked burial records to see if any of those hundreds of children were buried in cemeteries in Galway or neighbouring County Mayo – and couldn't find any. Without excavation, Catherine couldn't prove it beyond doubt. She now believed that hundreds of children had been buried in an unmarked mass grave, possibly in a disused sewage tank, at the St Mary's Home. When her findings broke into an international news story in 2014, there was considerable hostility in her home town. "People weren't believing me," she recalled. Many cast doubt - and scorn - that an amateur historian could uncover such an enormous scandal. But there was a witness who had seen it with her own eyes. Warning: The following sections contain details some readers might find distressing Mary Moriarty lived in one of the houses near the site of the institution in the mid-1970s. Shortly after she spoke to BBC News, she passed away, but her family have agreed to allow what she told us to be published and broadcast. Mary recalled two women coming to her in the early 1970s saying "they saw a young fella with a skull on a stick". Mary and her neighbours asked the child where he had found the skull. He showed them some shrubbery and Mary, who went to look, "fell in a hole". Light streamed in from where she had fallen. That's when she saw "little bundles", wrapped in cloths that had gone black from rot and damp, and were "packed one after the other, in rows up to the ceiling". How many? "Hundreds," she replied. Some time later, when Mary's second son was born in the maternity hospital in Tuam, he was brought to her by the nuns who worked there "in all these bundles of cloths" - just like those she had seen in that hole. "That's when I copped on," Mary says, "what I had seen after I fell down that hole were babies." In 2017, Catherine's findings were confirmed - an Irish government investigation found "significant quantities of human remains" in a test excavation of the site. The bones were not from the famine and the "age-at-death range" was from about 35 foetal weeks to two or three years. By now, a campaign was under way for a full investigation of the site - Anna Corrigan was among those who wanted the authorities to start digging. Until she was in her 50s, Anna believed she was an only child. But, when researching her family history in 2012, she discovered her mother had given birth to two boys in the home in 1946 and 1950, John and William. Anna was unable to find a death certificate for William, but did find one for John – it officially registers his death at 16 months. Under cause of death it listed "congenital idiot" and "measles". An inspection report of the home in 1947 had some more details about John. "He was born normal and healthy, almost nine pounds (4kg) in weight," Anna said. "By the time he's 13 months old, he's emaciated with a voracious appetite, and has no control over bodily functions. "Then he's dead three months later." An entry from the institution's book of "discharges" says William died in 1951 – she does not know where either is buried. Anna, who set up the Tuam Babies Family Group for survivors and relatives, said the children have been given a voice. "We all know their names. We all know they existed as human beings." Now, the work begins to find out the full extent of what lies beneath that patch of grass in Tuam. The excavation is expected to take about two years. "It's a very challenging process – really a world-first," said Daniel MacSweeney, the head of the operation, who has helped find missing bodies in conflict zones such as Afghanistan. He explained that the remains would have been mixed together and that an infant's femur - the body's largest bone - is only the size of an adult's finger. "They're absolutely tiny," he said. "We need to recover the remains very, very carefully – to maximise the possibility of identification." The difficulty of identifying the remains "can't be underestimated", he added. For however long it takes, there will be people like Anna waiting for news - hoping to hear about sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts and cousins they never had the chance to meet. Details of help and support with child bereavement are available in the UK at BBC Action Line Timeline: Irish mother and baby homes controversy Pre-excavation work begins at mass burial site Irish PM to apologise over mother-and-baby homes Tuam babies whistleblower 'optimistic for closure' 'I need to know what happened to my brothers'
