Children's Frequently Asked Questions

Your social worker will be able to tell you why you have to live so far away and how much you can see your family.  If you are allowed, then they would be able to visit you here or we can take you to see them.

If your social worker agrees you can have your phone and use social media if you are old enough, but we have certain restrictions which we can go through with you when you arrive.

The adults in the home will be happy to read you a story and tuck you up in bed, if you get on well with your peers, they might like to read you a story and we will make sure we have plenty of books that you like.

Again, if your social worker agrees we would want to meet your friends’ parents to check you are safe and then this could go ahead.

If possible, you could bring the dog, if not we will help to make sure there is someone to look after him and hopefully you could go and visit.

We will happily support you in your vegan lifestyle and will encourage you to go shopping with us and help to cook vegan meals, you could help us to learn how important this is to you.

Unfortunately, smoking is not allowed, however we would support you to give up

This will probably take some time, but hopefully you will soon learn that we will never lie to you and make sure we talk to you regularly about what you want and need.

We have people for you to talk to who can help you come to terms with how you are feeling and why you put yourself at risk.

You can bring your Xbox, but we have bedtimes to make sure you get enough sleep and again we will talk to you about this when you get here, we want you to be able to go on the Xbox at reasonable times as we understand how important it is to you.

We do not have favourites and the adults will try to spend time with all of the young people in the home, we have lots of spaces where you don’t have to be in the same room as another young person if you don’t get on, but we will talk to you all about having respect for each other as you all live in the same home.

We will not allow bullying at all in the home – we have someone for you to talk to about becoming confident with the person you are and having the chance to talk about how you feel.

You could cook your own meals and we can also help you to do this if needed, most of our rooms are en-suite and you would be able to clean this yourself, if not able to have your own bathroom the adults check regularly that they are clean.

You will be expected to go to bed at a certain time, but the adults can sit with you until you go to sleep, and we will make sure your room is comfortable and you have everything you need.  You could maybe go to sleep with quiet music playing and we have other things we could give you to help with this.

The home has their own Netflix accounts, and you will have a television in your room, at times young people do have their own accounts and we can talk about this with your social worker when you arrive at the home.

You will not be allowed to by cannabis whilst you are living with us, however, you can have money to buy other things.  If we thought you were buying cannabis, we would keep your money and you would have to spend it with staff.  We would support you to give up smoking cannabis as we would be worried about your health.

Providing it is close enough for us to get to we would be happy to take you to training and matches and would really love to watch you play if you didn’t mind.  If it is really far away, we would help you to join a new club close to us.

We would look at this and if we agreed with you and your social worker and parents that you are safe this would be fine.

If you are close enough for us to take you, we would always wish for you to stay in your own school even if it was quite a long car journey, if you did have to change schools we would help you with this and make sure you went to visit before you changed school.

We will take you to the concert even if it means we have to stay in a hotel for the night as we understand how important it is to you, we will also make sure you have an instrument and staff would love to watch you play.

We will go through the complaint with you and make sure it goes to the right person, it might not be possible to return home and if this is the case, we would do everything we can to make your stay with us as rewarding as possible and provide you with some nice memories.

If you are allowed to have visits with your brother, we would help you with this but it may be that there are some restrictions which stop your brother being allowed to see you.

We will talk to your social worker and if you are not happy, we can arrange for an advocate to visit you whose job it is to make sure your wishes are heard.

There are a lot of support groups in our area which we would put you in touch with and there are also people that could work with your parents to help them to come to terms with your sexuality.

You would be able to legally change your name when you are 18, however, it may be that you want to be called a different name on a day-to-day basis which we can assist you with.

We like all our young people to personalise their room to a certain degree however it needs to be a calming room where you can feel relaxed, your key worker will talk to you about this and yes you can choose all your soft furnishings etc.

We don’t ‘punish’ children but there are some boundaries you need to stick to and consequences if you don’t.  We would talk to you about these and explain why we were putting them in place.

On a day-to-day basis we will discuss with you about your views, wishes and feelings, what you like to do, what kind of foods you like etc.  On a more long-term basis you will be invited to attend meetings about what you would like to happen.

We encourage all the young people to go to bed at a reasonable time and there are consequences for them if they keep other young people up.  We can also look at ear plugs etc.  You will be coming to a settled home where we don’t usually have these problems but if they were to occur, we would deal with them.

We wouldn’t really know to start with as we don’t know all of your circumstances, but we would talk to you and your social worker about this when you arrive.  It is very homely, and we would encourage you to bring all your things with you.

Yes, you will be safe, the home is a safe environment, and the staff are all trained to be safe.

We will make sure that you have enough clothes that fit you and that you like.

We will agree times for you to call your mum, we want you to stay in touch but don’t want you becoming upset before bed or school etc.

If it makes you feel safe there is no reason why you can’t have a key to your room, however staff would still be able to get in if they were worried about you.

We would only hold you if we were worried that you were going to hurt yourself or other people or if you were going to do lots of damage.

Yes, we would take you to the doctors but also help you to get good advice before you did this.