Our Services

Established in 2022, Great Oak Lodge brought a new approach to creating provisions for children and young people in the East of England.

In line with the directors’ experience, both personal and professionally, along with his aspirations, the service provides bespoke, specialist residential provisions for children and young people. We offer stable, consistent, supportive, and caring environments where the individuals residing can flourish at every opportunity they receive.

We know there is not “one size fits all” when it comes to providing care and support and that is why we tailor our services to meet the individual needs of every child and young person.

We are committed to the protection, welfare, growth and development of every child and young person we look after, helping to shape their future. Through effective communication, compassion and commitment, Great Oak Lodge changes the directions and the lives of those we can support, setting them on a path to a more positive future.

Our homes utilise the Secure Base model which provides a positive framework for therapeutic caregiving which helps children and young people to move towards greater security and builds resilience.

The Secure Base model has been developed through a range of research and practice dissemination projects led by Emeritus Professor Gillian Schofield and Dr Mary Beek in the Centre for Research on Children and Families at the University of East Anglia, UK.

It is a positive, strengths-based approach that focuses on the interaction between the caregiver and the child, but also considers how that relationships can enable the child to develop competence in the outside world and manage often complex relationships with birth family members.

The model focuses on the interactions that occur between caregivers and children on a day to day, minute by minute basis within the caregiving environment.

But it also considers how those relationships can enable the child to develop competence in the outside world of education, peer group and community.

This process begins with the child’s needs and behaviour and then focuses on what is going on in the mind of the caregiver. How a caregiver thinks and feels about a child’s needs and behaviour will determine his or her caregiving behaviours. The caregiver may draw on their own ideas about what children need or what makes a good parent from their own experiences or from what they have learned from training.

More information on the secure base model can be found here: The Secure Base model – Professor Gillian Schofield and Dr Mary Beek – Groups and Centres (uea.ac.uk)