Four young people, in an ordinary house, in an ordinary street.
Spinney Cottage is a four-bedded children's home in Polesworth, Warwickshire, for young people aged 13 to 17. Small on purpose, clinically supported, and plain about what we can and cannot hold.
- Places
- Four
- Age on admission
- 13–17
- Sex
- Mixed
- Regulator
- Ofsted
- Staffing
- 24 hours
- Status
- Not yet open
We are a small home on purpose.
Four is small enough that a young person is known rather than managed, and small enough that the adults can hold a relationship through the weeks when a young person is testing whether we will.
Alpha Care Group Ltd is a Warwickshire children's services provider. Spinney Cottage is our first home, and for now our only one. Our practice is trauma-informed, relationship-based and built for young people with a learning disability and autistic young people.
A clinical psychologist holds a formulation of every young person living here and works with the staff team. That is not a service bolted onto the house; it is how the house thinks, and it is the difference between a team that manages behaviour and a team that understands it.
We would rather decline a referral than accept one we cannot meet. Where we decline, we say why, in writing, to the placing authority.
Spinney Cottage is not yet open, and has admitted no young people.
Alpha Care Group Ltd has applied to Ofsted for registration as a children's home. No young person will be admitted before the Registered Manager is in post, her registration is determined, and the establishment is recruited to the level the first placement requires. Change of use to Class C2 was granted in October 2025, and Warwickshire County Council's commissioning team walked the house and grounds in September 2026.
Young people aged 13 to 17, looked after by a local authority.
Most young people living here will have more than one of these needs. Our assessment and our care planning start from the young person rather than from a list of diagnoses.
- A learning disability
- Trauma and attachment difficulties, including neglect, abuse or exploitation
- Autism, including alongside a learning disability
- Behaviour others find challenging, which we understand as communication
- ADHD and other neurodevelopmental conditions
- A history of placement breakdown or instability
- Mental health needs
Self-harm. It is common among young people who have lived through what this cohort has lived through, and a home that excluded it would exclude most of the children who need one. We accept young people who self-harm where it is used as a way of managing distress and a young person can be helped to learn another way.
A history of self-harm, including ligature or strangulation, does not exclude a referral on its own. What is assessed is what the young person's safety plan requires now, against what this building and this staffing can deliver.
What we can hold, and what we cannot.
Most provider websites publish only the first of these. Both belong here, set in the same type and given the same room, because a placement made against the second is a placement that breaks.
What we can hold
With relationships, a safety plan written with the young person, proportionate environmental care, and clinical input where it is needed.
- Behaviour that others find challenging, understood through a functional assessment and a behaviour support plan built for that individual.
- Self-harm used to manage distress — cutting, scratching, burning and similar — where a young person can be helped to learn another way.
- A history of going missing, with the missing from care procedure and Warwickshire's Independent Missing Children Practitioners.
- Exploitation risk, assessed against this specific location before any placement is agreed.
- Enhanced staffing — solo, two-to-one or three-to-one — agreed and funded in writing before admission.
- Emergency and same-day admissions, on the terms set out under referrals.
What we cannot
We are not registered as, and do not provide, the following. These limits are absolute and are not traded away at placement planning.
- A secure children's home. We cannot lawfully restrain a young person to stop them leaving this house — regulation 20(1)(c) permits that only in a secure home, and this is not one.
- A ligature-resistant environment. No anti-ligature assessment of the house has been carried out and none is held as a standing measure. We do not accept a referral where safety depends on one, on continuous observation, or on medical monitoring.
- Nursing or clinical treatment by us. We employ no clinicians, and Alpha Care Group Ltd carries on no regulated activity under the Health and Social Care Act 2008.
- Education on site. We are not registered as a school.
- Care under the Mental Health Act 1983, or for a young person whose needs require clinical adaptations beyond a domestic setting.
- Short breaks. Spinney Cottage provides longer-term care to children who are looked after.
- Any placement we have assessed we cannot meet safely alongside those already living here.
Behaviour is communication.
Behaviour that challenges is information about an unmet need, an environment that does not fit, or a demand that cannot be managed. Our first question is what the young person is telling us, not how to stop it.
Statement of Purpose · §2.1Fitted out for this cohort, rather than furnished as a house and then used as a home.
A detached two-storey house in a residential street. Three separate rooms downstairs mean a family visit, a professional meeting and the ordinary life of the house can happen at the same time without displacing each other.
Ground floor
First floor
The architect’s floor plans. On the ground floor the three living rooms are drawn as Living Room, Visitor’s Room / Library and Quiet Room — the communal hub, the second lounge and the snug respectively. Upstairs, every young person has a single room; Bedroom 02 is the one without an en-suite and has sole use of Bathroom 02 beside it. Open either drawing to view it full size.
- Four bedrooms of 14 to 20 m² upstairs, three with en-suites, plus two further bathrooms. Every young person has a single room. Nobody shares.
- Bedrooms are decorated by the young person who lives in them. Staff do not enter uninvited except where there is an immediate concern for safety.
- The snug is genuinely available and is never used as a sanction or a seclusion space.
- Low-arousal design throughout — adjustable lighting, acoustic treatment, a controlled colour palette, and zoned space so a young person can be near people without being with them.
Secured externally without being secured internally. Anti-snap cylinder locks on all external doors with a key register, two lockable gates, completed boundary treatment and motion-sensor floodlighting. Every external door opens from the inside at all times. The home is staffed 24 hours a day, which is why there is no intruder alarm — the building is never empty.
Fire safety is specified to FD30 doors with concealed closers and a BS 5839-1 Category L1 alarm. First-floor window restrictors limit the opening to 100 mm or less and release only with a key, fitted after the window risk assessment rather than before it, and both completed before the first young person is admitted.
No young person sleeps anywhere but the four bedrooms in the main house. The meeting room and garage in the grounds are not sleeping accommodation, and if that ever changed the Statement of Purpose would be revised and HMCI notified before the change took effect.
Repair matters more than consequence.
Each young person has a behaviour support plan built from a functional assessment: what a good day looks like, what the early signs of distress are for that individual, what helps, and what makes things worse.
Low arousal, by design
Adjustable lighting, acoustic treatment, a controlled colour palette and zoned space. Staff are trained to reduce demands rather than escalate them.
Predictability and choice together
Routine that can be relied on, and inside it real choices that are honoured. When the answer is no, we say so to their face, we say why, and we record it. A young person who is told no honestly and quickly can argue with us. A young person who is managed cannot.
No sanctions culture
Where harm is done, we work on understanding the impact and repairing the relationship. There is no sanctions ladder, no removal of contact as punishment, no withholding of food, and no financial penalty beyond what regulation permits by way of reparation.
Restraint as the last resort
Permitted only to prevent injury or serious damage to property, and never to stop a young person leaving. All care staff complete NAPPI training against the current Restraint Reduction Network Training Standards before working unsupervised. Every use is recorded, discussed with the young person afterwards, and analysed for pattern.
No surveillance inside the home
No cameras, listening devices, door alarms or movement sensors in bedrooms, bathrooms or living areas. Two external cameras cover the approaches — the front door and the private lane. Nothing else is covered, recordings are overwritten after 30 days, and young people are told what exists and where.
Restriction, examined as a whole
Every restriction is looked at cumulatively rather than one at a time. The question is not whether any single rule is reasonable, but what the whole of a young person's day here adds up to, measured against the ordinary life of a young person of the same age.
The same clinician, throughout.
A report from a stranger who never returns changes very little. A clinician who knows the young person and keeps coming back changes how they are cared for.
We employ no clinicians and deliver no clinical treatment ourselves. We work on a consultant basis with The Neuro Medical Group Ltd, registered with the Care Quality Commission for the treatment of disease, disorder or injury, covering children aged 0 to 18.
The reason we have this relationship is time. A young person who needs a neurodevelopmental or mental health assessment usually needs it long before the NHS can provide one, and for a young person whose placement, education and safety all turn on understanding what is actually going on, a year is not a neutral period.
The child neuropsychologist who carries out an assessment stays involved: contributing to the care plan, reviewing it as the plan changes, meeting the young person face to face, and sitting with the staff team so the people on shift understand what the assessment means in practice. Sessions take place in the meeting room in the grounds, so a young person is not asked to travel to an unfamiliar clinic and the house stays a home.
An addition to NHS provision, never a substitute for it.
Buying a private assessment does not discharge our regulation 10 duty or take a young person off an NHS pathway. We do not diagnose, treat, prescribe or advise on medication, and we provide no nursing care.
- GP, dentist and optician registration within the first week.
- Statutory health assessments attended, chased and acted on.
- CAMHS and specialist referrals made and pursued, with waits escalated in writing rather than absorbed quietly.
- Medication never used to manage behaviour for the convenience of the home. We follow STOMP and STAMP and ask at every review whether the dose can be reduced or stopped.
A young person out of education is a young person available to be exploited.
So we treat it as a safeguarding issue, not an administrative one. One person owns education in this house: the Deputy Manager holds it — chasing places, attending reviews, tracking attendance, knowing what each young person is studying and what they want to do next. It is a named responsibility, not something that falls to whoever is on shift.
Where there is no school place, we work to timescales
- Two days
- We contact the placing authority's virtual school head and the SEN team.
- Day ten
- If nothing is in place, we escalate in writing to the placing authority.
- Day twenty
- We escalate again to a named senior manager, and the Registered Manager considers whether the placement is still right.
Meanwhile, we teach. Structured learning starts in the house from the first week — tutoring, online provision, functional English and maths, or work toward a qualification — funded by us where the placing authority has not yet commissioned it. We do not wait for someone else to pay before a young person starts learning again.
Post-16 is planned from 15, not from 16, because the drop-off at sixteen is where care-experienced young people lose education altogether. A young person who becomes NEET while living here is a failure of ours to plan, and we treat it that way.
We do not use unregistered alternative provision. Where alternative provision is commissioned we check what it is, who runs it, whether it is registered where it needs to be, and what the safeguarding arrangements are — and we visit.
We report the failures as well. A young person out of education for six weeks appears in our reporting as six weeks, not as "awaiting provision".
One thing you do regularly, with people who are not paid to be with you.
Every young person is supported to have at least one thing outside the house — a club, a team, a gym, a course, a job, a place of worship, a hobby with other people in it. Where a young person has no idea what they want, we try things with them until something takes. We pay the costs, the fees and the transport, and we go along.
Family and friends
Contact is the young person's, not ours. It happens unless there is a lawful and recorded reason it should not, and never stops as a consequence of behaviour. Three rooms downstairs mean a visit never has to happen in a bedroom. Phone and video contact is private and is not listened to. Friends can come to the house on terms agreed with the young person.
Having a say
The test is not whether we ask, it is whether anything changes. The weekly house meeting — chaired by a young person where they want to chair it — decides menus, shopping, routines, décor and activities. Every action has a named owner and a date, and the meeting starts by going through what happened to last week's. A young person can see us fail to do something, and they will.
Routes that do not go through us
Advocacy is actively offered, not merely mentioned. The independent person's monthly visit includes speaking to young people in private. The independent reviewing officer, the social worker, Ofsted and the Children's Commissioner's Help at Hand service are all available directly, and the numbers are on the wall.
Identity
Recorded at admission in the young person's own words. In practice: food a young person recognises, cooked in the house; time, space and transport for worship; interpretation where it is needed, never through another child; hair and skin care products that actually suit them; and being addressed by the name and pronouns they use.
Where a young person does not speak
We find the method that works — symbols, objects of reference, a communication app, a trusted adult — and we use it. We do not treat the absence of speech as the absence of a view.
Families are not judged
A young person's family may be the reason they are looked after, and is still their family. Staff speak about parents and relatives in front of young people in a way that would not embarrass us if the parent were in the room.
The seven things we are trying to achieve.
Progress is tracked against each young person's own starting point and reviewed at every looked-after child review. The independent person visits monthly under regulation 44, and their reports go to Ofsted, the registered person and the placing authorities.
- 1A home rather than a placement. Their own room, their own things, their own routines, and a say in how the house runs.
- 2Education that moves. In education, training or employment and making progress in it, measured against where that young person started and not against anyone else.
- 3Safer at the end than at the start. Better able to recognise exploitation, better able to ask for help, less often missing, and with shorter episodes when they are.
- 4More able to run their own life than when they arrived, in practical capability and in confidence.
- 5Restriction is the exception. Always the least that will do, always being reduced, always recorded and worked on with a plan to remove it.
- 6Their view carries weight in decisions about their life, including where they disagree with us.
- 7We are honest with placing authorities, families and Ofsted, including when something has gone wrong.
The establishment is derived from the rota, not estimated from a headcount.
A rota that cannot actually be worked is a safeguarding risk before it is a budgeting problem. Day cover is two staff on shift with one or two young people and three at three or four, across a fourteen-hour day. There are two staff in the building throughout the night.
Becky Jones
Designated Safeguarding Lead, based at the home. Holds a full and relevant Level 5 Diploma in Leadership and Management for Residential Childcare, with more than two years' relevant experience in the last five and at least one year supervising staff in a care role.
Marc Amron
Supervises the management of the home, holds provider oversight, receives the regulation 44 reports and the safeguarding audits, and carries out documented oversight visits. Supervises the Registered Manager formally and on the record — a manager who is not supervised is a risk to the home.
All care staff hold or are working towards the Level 3 Diploma for Residential Childcare. Recruitment applies Schedule 2 in full: two written references, one from the most recent employer, full employment history with gaps explained, and an enhanced DBS check including the children's barred list. Formal supervision is at least every six weeks, recorded.
Two staff in the building, throughout the night
Every night, for the whole of it.
The first reason is safety. A young person awake and distressed at three in the morning needs an adult with them, and the rest of the house still needs an adult too. Two people on site means one can sit with a young person for as long as it takes — or go out to look for one who is missing — without the other three being left without cover.
The second reason is the paperwork. Recording, handover notes, care plan updates, incident records and the daily logs get written overnight, in the hours when the house is quiet, rather than squeezed into a day of school runs, appointments, meetings and four young people who need the adults present and attentive. Records written in the last ten minutes of a busy shift are written badly, and in this work the record is often the only thing that protects a young person later.
Staffing model
The full establishment — every post, its full-time equivalent, and the rota the figures are derived from — is provided to placing authorities on request. Staffing is set by the assessed needs of the young people actually living here, and is reviewed whenever those needs change, whenever a young person is admitted, and after any significant incident.
One-to-one support sits on top of that establishment, not inside it.
Where a young person's plan requires one-to-one hours, those hours are commissioned and funded by the placing authority and staffed by additional workers recruited for the purpose. Absorbing them into the core rota would quietly reduce the cover available to the other three young people.
Nine things have to be true before we say yes.
Referrals are assessed by the Registered Manager, with the Responsible Individual where the decision is finely balanced. The Registered Manager may decline any referral, and no one at Alpha Care Group Ltd will overrule a decline on commercial grounds. Where we decline, we say why, in writing.
- 1Age and sex. Aged 13 to 17 on admission, any sex.
- 2Legal status. Looked after by a local authority. We do not accept a placement that would require us to deprive a young person of their liberty without a court authorisation.
- 3Needs we can meet — and not those we have set out that we cannot.
- 4We have the information. Care plan, placement plan, risk assessments, chronology, health and education information, missing and exploitation history, offending history, and any known risk to or from other children.
- 5Impact on the young people already here. A written impact risk assessment covering every young person in the house. The group we already have is a reason to say no, and we use it.
- 6Education. A realistic plan for education, training or employment from this address.
- 7Location. The location assessment considered against this young person's specific risks, and shared with the placing authority.
- 8Funding. Placement and any enhanced staffing agreed in writing before admission.
- 9Staffing. We have the staff, with the right training, for the young person's plan. Not the staff we hope to recruit.
Planned admissions
Wherever possible the young person visits, meets the staff and the other young people, sees the bedroom, and has a say in it. Where they cannot or will not visit, we go to them, and we send photographs and the children's guide in advance.
Emergency and same-day admissions
We accept them, because young people needing one are the young people most often let down. We accept them on terms:
- The nine criteria still apply. Emergency changes the timescale, not the test — in particular the impact assessment on the young people already living here.
- A minimum information set before arrival: legal status and parental responsibility, known risks to self and others, risk to or from other children, health, medication, allergies, and the out-of-hours social worker contact.
- The placement plan is completed within 24 hours, and the young person's own view is sought at the first opportunity.
- A review at 72 hours and at 28 days with the placing authority, of whether this is the right home.
- We will say no. A broken placement costs a young person more than a night in the wrong bed.
We would rather you formed your view by standing in it.
Spinney Cottage is in Polesworth, a village in North Warwickshire, in a residential street among family housing. Polesworth gives us the two things this cohort needs from a location: ordinariness, and reach. It is a village, so a young person is not living in a night-time economy or a town-centre drug market — and it is within short reach of Tamworth, Atherstone and Nuneaton for education, health, leisure and work.
Warwickshire County Council's commissioning team walked the house and grounds in September 2026, and that offer is open to any authority considering a placement here. The full location assessment — recorded crime, county lines and exploitation risk, protective factors — is given to placing authorities before any placement is agreed.
Who to speak to, including when it is about us.
A young person may also speak to their social worker, their independent reviewing officer, the independent person who visits monthly, an advocate, or Help at Hand. They do not need our permission or our help to do any of that.
Referrals and enquiries
Becky Jones, Registered Manager. First point of contact for placing authorities, social workers and families.
- Home
- Polesworth, North Warwickshire
The full address and the duty number are given to placing authorities with the referral pack.
If a complaint is unresolved
Or if the complaint is about the Registered Manager, it goes to the Responsible Individual.
- Name
- Marc Amron
Our complaints procedure is written under regulation 39, given to every young person on arrival in a form they can use, and available to anyone who asks.
Ofsted, at any time
Anyone may contact Ofsted directly, without going through us first.
- Phone
- 0300 123 1231
- Post
- Piccadilly Gate, Store Street, Manchester M1 2WD
Policies on request, without charge. Any person, body or organisation involved in the care or protection of a young person may obtain our child protection and behaviour management policies from the Registered Manager, by email — safeguarding, behaviour support, physical intervention and restraint, missing from care, prevention of bullying, and allegations against staff. They are also sent, unrequested, to every placing authority as part of the placement information pack.