Rose Collinson, Director of Childcare and Adult Services - Medway Council.
"Medway Council have been incredibly grateful to the Peter De Haan Charitable Trust for enabling the set up of a really innovative therapeutic project operating from one of our pupil referral units. We recognised that against a backdrop of historically high school exclusions the emotional needs of our young people were not being met. Through very careful collaboration with Trustees we were able to develop a project plan with clearly defined outcome measures, finance profile and milestones. The project had two strands. One was outreach into mainstream schools providing training, individual child interventions and helping schools to modify / develop their pastoral systems. The second was a team of therapists including psychotherapists, reflexologists and play therapists. We were even able to develop a therapeutic garden.

The needs of young people often distressed and distressing - were always at the heart of the planning and the on going discussions with Trustees. By using case studies we were able to help Trustees to understand the difficulties being faced by our young people and to describe the impact individual therapists were having. In terms of an overall outcome measure, we are very proud to say that our permanent exclusion figures have dropped from 54 for the academic year 2006-07 to 8 by the end of 2008-09. We could not have done this without the PDCT support and the close relationship with the Trustees which enabled them to understand the project."

Sir Norman Wakefield - Charity Doctor
“The Trust has played a unique role, recognising the potential of several troubled charities, working with the management proactively, and providing core funding, sometimes in high risk situations, with outstanding results.”

Alan Yentob, Chairman - Kids Company
“Funding from the Trust came at a critical time for my Charity enabling it to progress. With the funding came tough terms which together with the financial leverage that was achieved, helped us enormously.”

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