NCH - A History of the Charity

December 7th, 2006

In 1869 a young Methodist minister, Thomas Stephenson, arrived in London to take up his new post at the chapel in Lambeth.

Moved by the plight of children living on the streets, he came up with the idea of a home for young boys, where they would be safe from poverty and crime.

Together with two Methodist friends, Alfred Mager and Frances Horner, Stephenson renovated a disused stable in Church Street. The first two boys, Fred and George, were admitted to the Children’s Home on 9 July 1869.

The name reflected Stephenson’s farsighted commitment to a family-style system of childcare, which would be disciplined but loving. At a time when most children who could not stay with their families lived in big institutions, like the humiliating workhouses, Stephenson’s establishment of small homes supported by private donation was pioneering.

Within three years girls were being admitted, the enterprise had moved to larger premises near Stephenson’s new ministry in Bethnal Green, and a second home established at Edgworth Farm on the Lancashire moors.

In 1875 a school for young offenders opened at Gravesend, Kent, and by 1908 the organisation had grown into the National Children’s Home and Orphanage.

Professional from the start, Stephenson’s recognition of the importance of professional training was a significant contribution to the development of childcare in the UK.

‘It is a huge mistake to suppose that anybody who can wash a child’s face or sew a button upon a child’s dress is fit for work such as ours,’ said Stephenson.

In 1878 of a group of young women, originally taken in as orphans and foundlings, began a remarkable year-long training course that included childcare, and what has come to be known as child psychology.

By 1892, 140 graduates, known as ‘the sisterhood’, were working full time for the Children’s Home.

Even in its early years the Children’s Home was encouraging the ‘boarding out’, or fostering, of younger children with approved families.

Sometimes these arrangements became permanent. The annual report for 1892 records that 25 children were adopted, although this has no official status.

The policy may have begun as a reaction to pressure on residential places, but its inherent advantages soon became clear, and the roots of modern childcare were evident even at this early stage.

Siblings were placed together, and families found for ‘difficult’ children. From the 1920s, children were carefully matched with adoptive families and encouraged to think well of their birth parents.

The National Children’s Home campaigned for the legal recognition of adoption, becoming an adoption agency in 1926. Later, it influenced the 1948 Children Act, which paved the way for adoption to become the leading childcare strategy.

In peak years the Children’s Home found families for more than 300 infants a year. In the mid-1960s, we took another pioneering step, helping children with disabilities or histories of abuse, previously considered impossible to place because of their special needs.

The social changes of the post-war years prompted a shift away from rescuing children from ‘problem’ families and placing them in children’s homes.

The focus began to shift towards preventative action, supporting vulnerable parents through the family aid scheme, day nurseries and family centres. When these centres first opened they were an innovation, but today they dominate our work.

NCH also has a history of working with children with severe physical or learning difficulties.

Other work has developed steadily too.

Today, NCH works with more children and young people, including those affected by poverty, disability and abuse, than any other UK charity.

We are the leading UK provider of services for disabled children and their families, children’s services in rural areas, family and community centres, and services for young people leaving care.

Reflecting this evolution away from children’s homes, we are now known simply as NCH.

Our name

NCH was founded in 1869 as the Children’s Home. We later became known as the National Children’s Home and then simply by the acronym NCH.

In the rest of this site you can find out more about NCH’s work. This continues to be driven by the characteristics and beliefs that embodied Revd Dr Stephenson’s original mission.

His positive outlook, his development of effective responses to local needs, his innovation and his thorough professionalism all inform our important work more than 130 years later.

The problems of child poverty and social exclusion have persisted from the Victorian era, so NCH continues to seek effective solutions that meet local communities’ needs, and to campaign for changes that will give children and young people the support and opportunities they need to reach their full potential.

Extracted from NCH website

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