NSPCC opens new children's centre in Manchester
The NSPCC is opening a new centre for children in Manchester city centre. The facility on Oldham Road will offer child protection services to vulnerable children and their families. It will be opened officially in a ceremony today, headed by NBA basketball star and children's campaigner John Amaechi OBE.
The centre will be staffed by a team of 22, including a specialist team of social workers, psychologists, speech and language therapists, education professionals and play therapists. They will run the following programmes:
FEDUP (Family Environment: Drug Using Parents), to protect children living with adult substance misuse. The programme aims to help children live safely in families with drug or alcohol problems and to help parents demonstrate better parenting skills.
Family SMILES (Simplifying Mental Illness plus Life Enhancement Skills): Family SMILES works with children who have at least one parent living with a mental health problem to reduce the risk of harm and boost their self-esteem.
Letting the Future In provides therapeutic services to help children move on with their lives after sexual abuse. Recent figures from Greater Manchester Police revealed that 886 children were victims of sexual assault in Greater Manchester last year, of which 30 were aged five or under, 109 hadn't reached secondary school age and 777 were aged 11-17 year-olds.
The Treatment of Young People with Harmful Sexual Behaviour: a Manual Based Approach will prevent sexual abuse by working with children and young people who show harmful sexual behaviour. One in three sexual offences are committed by children and young people but there are few treatment services for children who sexually abuse. NSPCC practitioners will use a range of therapies to get to the root causes of the child's behaviour, examine the child's relationships with other children and adults and help them to control and alter their behaviour.
A new multi-disciplinary team for children with learning disabilities will work with children with severe and profound multiple learning difficulties. The team will work in partnership with local agencies to improve the protection of this vulnerable group of children.