Attach Service

Attach Service

Support and interventions into our services for children in care and care leavers, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and young people, special guardianship and kinship families.

Helping children and young people to strengthen relationships with their carers and to grow trust.

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 social workers or lead practitioners

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 for young people and their 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 young people

Before we meet with young people/children, we will send them some questionnaires to complete. This helps us begin to understand their difficulties. We will carefully read the referral information, including any information we have about their early life experiences before they came into care and since.

Following this, we’ll meet for an assessment meeting where the young person/child will be able to tell us about the difficulties they are experiencing and what they would like to change. Sometimes our work is with carers only and sometimes with carers and children/young people. We will meet with them and their carer together or separately, based on what we and the child/young person thinks will be most helpful.

Once we have met with them and developed a shared understanding of the difficulties their family is experiencing, we will discuss what we think is the best way for us to work with them.

Following our assessments, we share our ideas and how we think we can help.

We offer a range of interventions and will talk with the young person/child about which of these we think would be most appropriate for them and what their goals for this work will be.