Children's homes
The Children's Society opened its first residential nursery for babies and young children after the First World War. By the late 1950s a further 33 residential nurseries had been set up. The Children's Society was at the forefront in this area: the nurseries were run by professional nursery nurses, and many became nationally recognised centres for teaching and practice. The Society's own training scheme for nursery nurses, begun in 1942, went on to become the model for the Ministry of Education's National Nursery Examination Board training scheme. We also ran six training colleges, as well as other joint schemes with other local institutions.
The huge challenges posed by the Second World War were met by The Children's Society undertaking an extensive programme to provide temporary homes for evacuees or children made homeless as a result of the hostilities. 6788 children were housed in 127 war nurseries.
Several homes specialised in providing children with training for a trade. Standon Farm Home gave agricultural training; St Aldhelm's, Frome, offered printing apprenticeships; St Boniface, Sampford Peverall, taught carpentry and market gardening; and St Mary's Home, Lowestoft, provided training in domestic science. The Society was also a pioneer in the care of young people with disabilities.
After young people had left the care of The Children's Society, welfare staff would visit them. Some qualified for wage subsidies if they were poorly paid or in financial difficulties. The children also had opportunities in higher education through scholarships and the Founder's Bursary Fund. Some secured grammar school and university places at a time when only a small proportion of the general population had this chance.
Although The Children's Society did their best to make the surroundings in the homes as pleasant as possible, it was Rudolf felt that the ideal would be if children could find a new family, or spend the time in care in a family unit. Some children spent time with carefully selected foster parents and in 1935 The Children's Society became a registered adoption agency. By the 1960s it was one of the country's main agencies and between 1960 and 1980 we placed 10,068 children for adoption.
"Grant Schemes"
In the 1930s The Children's Society started looking at ways to prevent children having to be taken into care and in 1936 we introduced a grant scheme designed to help parents facing financial difficulty keep their children at home. During the 1950s the scheme helped around 700 children each year. This foreshadowed the move towards family-based care that was to accelerate from the late 1960s
