Values
Passion – we are driven by our desire to help children and young people overcome injustice and disadvantage
Equality – we believe all children and young people have equal worth and equal rights
Hope – we believe in a child or young person’s potential, no matter what they have experienced or what they have done
Purpose
To help the most vulnerable children and young people break through injustice, deprivation and inequality, so they can achieve their full potential.
Vision
Our vision is of a world where all children and young people have a sense of belonging and are loved and valued. A world where they can fulfil their potential, shape their destiny and experience the joy of life.
Operational mission
NCH meets the needs of children and young people who most need support to achieve their full potential. Through our work and through speaking out, we seek to break the cycle of deprivation. We challenge injustice and empower children to overcome the obstacles in their lives that hold them back. We tailor our work to local circumstances, in partnership with children and young people, families, communities and local organisations.
We work with children and young people
- Whose families need support
- Who cannot live with their birth families
- Who are disabled
- Who experience severe difficulties in their lives
Extracted from NCH website.
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
December 7th, 2006
NCH one of the UK’s leading children’s charities, helping children achieve their full potential. Through our services we support some of the UK’s most vulnerable and excluded children and young people.
NCH was founded in 1869 and known for many years as the National Children’s Home. We are now known as NCH, the children’s charity.
The children, young people and families we work with face difficulties such as poverty, disability and abuse.
What we believe
We believe all children and young people have unique potential and that they should have the support and opportunities they need to reach it.
We have been working to make this vision a reality for over 135 years.
Our work
NCH runs more than 500 projects for some of the UK’s most vulnerable and excluded children and young people, and their families, supporting over 160,000 people at children’s centres throughout the UK.
We also promote social justice by lobbying and campaigning for change.
Today, NCH is the leading UK provider of family and community centres, children’s services in rural areas, services for disabled children and their families, and services for young people leaving care.
Where we work
NCH provides services in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and is one of the UK’s leading children’s charities. We also support work in Southern Africa, the Caribbean and Central America.
Working in partnership
We work in partnership to develop services in response to the needs of local children, young people and their families.
Extracted from NCH website
December 7th, 2006