About us

We are specialists. We heal child trauma through Restorative Parenting.

We are committed to recover children from trauma and began with a single 2 bed residential children’s home. Twenty plus years on, we own 4 residential children’s homes (8 to 10 bed), each having an onsite school education provision. We care for up to 33 resident children every day across Manchester, England. In 2020 we are expanding to Stoke and will be increasing our workforce by up to 50%.

We specialise in caring for children who have entered the care system because of failures in parenting. They have often been severely neglected, emotionally and physically, and many have suffered sexual abuse and cruelty. Exposure to parental mental illness, family breakdown, alcoholism, drug addiction and violence are common documented stories of children going through our care proceedings. Removing a child from such experiences to protect them from further harm, and in some cases to save their lives, is a necessary and vital step.

Our aim is to help recover children from trauma to live the most fulfilling lives they can. Our children range from 4 to 11 years at the point of placement and they enter a 18-24 month recovery clinical programme. We are proud of our workforce and we have recruited some of the most talented practitioners, psychologists, educationalists, and professionals in their field and we have a talented business team who provide support on a day to day basis.

Karen Mitchell-Mellor (Owner / Director) and Andrew Constable (Owner / Director)

Publications by the Halliwell Clinical Team

Halliwell provide an intensive recovery programme for children. Our clinical team provide clinical guidance, assessment, and therapeutic response to the identified needs of each individual child as well as present and conduct practice team consultations and training in order to filter down knowledge and experience and enhance the therapeutic environment provided by the practice team.

Healing Child Trauma Through Restorative Parenting - Published by Jessica Kingsley is now available on amazon.

Vision and Mission

Our vision is to “To be recognised as the leading organisation at providing Restorative Parenting® in England, integrating residential, fostering and educational practice.” Halliwell’s mission is “To improve the psychological well-being of children in the looked after sector." The success that Halliwell Homes Limited enjoys today is due to the many important contributions made by each of our employees.

Our Values

We have been embedding our mission ‘To improve the psychological well-being of children in the looked after sector’ across our organisation. Arriving into one of our services can be a time of great anxiety and emotional distress for children.

Our values run through our organisation and are a core part of the delivery of our services:

• Child-Centred
• Empathetic, Caring and Compassionate
• Resilient
• Accountable, Reliable and Self-Awareness
• Enthusiastic and Positive
• Professional and Intellectual Ability
• Clinical Excellence.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

At Halliwell Homes we are committed to equal opportunities and we value diversity. We support fair recruitment practices and as part of this we offer reasonable adjustments to assist disabled people who apply for a job as part of our recruitment and selection procedures.

If you want to play a significant in role in shaping a successful city take a look at our vacancies page.

Restorative Parenting

What is Restorative Parenting?

Halliwell operates the Restorative Parenting® Programme which focuses on therapeutically addressing the emotional, behaviourial, social and developmental needs of children in our care. Our Restorative Parenting® approach sets us apart from standard residential child care providers in that it is clinically informed in every aspect of the child’s lived therapeutic experience with the aim of helping traumatised children achieve recovery and psychological wellbeing. The RP Programme seeks to deliver recovery to the child within a time limited period (up to 24 months) achieving measurable improvement that enables children to achieve their local authority care plan (most usually to move to sustainable long term fostering or kinship placements).

How are therapeutic parents trained?

For those people in the role with a first degree, a home could also consider supporting further study right up to PhD level, as Halliwell Homes does. Therapeutic childcare is a valuable, vocational role, and therapeutic parents should be regarded as professional people in the same way that, for example, social workers and teachers are professionals. People joining as therapeutic parents will work for a professional childcare qualification – a Level 3 Diploma in Residential Childcare as well as Halliwell’s internal certificate in Restorative Parenting consisting of 5 units. This gives the therapeutic parent working knowledge of child development, attachment theory, childhood trauma, recovery process and some relevant child psychiatry.

Therapeutic Parenting is a means of compensating a child for what she has lacked from her parents or early carers. Pughe and Philpot (2007) explain:

Therapeutic parenting is a professional technique and, as such, is structured in the help that it offers, while giving as near as possible an approximation to the kind of positive parenting which a child should have received.

What is needed to be therapeutic parent?

The work of a therapeutic parent us demanding but can also be immensely satisfying. We seek to establish a workforce with proven academic ability and a willingness to undertake further training and studies, up to a degree and beyond. Informally, a certain amount of maturity and life experience is needed to parent children. Good therapeutic parents can come from a range of backgrounds and bring varied skills and experience to the role. For example, we have employed people who have previously been a hairdresser and someone who was in the Royal Navy. The variation in backgrounds is important to meet the different expectations of the children who enter our programme. The greatest challenge that faces the therapeutic parent is to invest in emotionally in, and be available, to the child; to engage the child so that, in turn, the child will not only learn to trust adults but also to realise why it is worth trusting in them. These are not just people doing a job or on shift or following a set of rules, but people working on a human level with a child. The adult, must be prepared to be there for the long-term; a long term commitment needs to be allied with emotional stability. The ideal recruit will be someone who is resilient, empathetic, attentive, able, physically able (due to the challenging behaviours children can display and in the safety interests of everyone), and willing to invest in the children and have an ability to learn and develop a knowledge base about children. Enthusiasm, self-awareness and emotional literacy, as well as intellectual ability and good communication skills, are characteristics to be looked for in the therapeutic parent.

It is important in therapeutic parents who work in the home to work alongside the education, clinical and business teams, as well as feel part of the whole programme, with an ability to contribute to its quality.

Case Study

The below reflects an important element of the programme – that what might appear mundane and routine can be mindfully therapeutic if considered part of the child’s lived experience.

Jackie’s fond farewell