Bespoke Guardians
Bespoke Guardians are based in Cricklade and were formed in 2019 by Robert Firmin in reaction to the need for steadfast, resilient, caring, and therapeutic placements for looked after and disabled children who were at risk of being sent to secure units or not having a placement open to them due to their challenging behaviour. Rob was ex-military and was a bodyguard at the time and he took on a task protecting a Mum and Dad who were being frequently attacked by their adoptive son – this was due to childhood trauma. Rob stayed the course and reduced the child’s aggression and challenging behaviour – local authority asked him to set up officially as a business. There are thousands of children who struggle to receive offers of a placement as the standard Childrens homes just cannot handle their behaviour or want to accept them as they are ‘too hard to handle’, ‘are too aggressive’, Most of these children are teenagers and have all experienced significant trauma in their early lives and because of this their intrinsic behaviour becomes untrusting, aggressive and they may self-harm or abscond frequently. These children generally struggle with feeling loved or safe.
Bespoke Guardians are a small company with a huge amount of passion for these children and we have safely looked after some of the UK’s most challenging and damaged children and transitioned them into ‘normal’ Childrens homes after they have stabilised and learnt to self-manage their behaviour, recognise that they are perfectly capable of a normal life in which they can build trusting relationships and be safe from harm. We do not have a career history within the care sector – Core management are ex-military and many of our staff are from the same background, the dogged determination and ability to see a task through to the end despite many hurdles, everything against us and an ‘impossible’ goal given is what we thrive on!
Ideally, we can help local authorities prior to them having to take a child into care by providing ‘edge of care’ service in the home working with parents to stabilise and understand what is driving the Childs’ challenging behaviour or indeed just provide some respite and training for the parents.
Its not an easy task for us and our staff but with buckets of resilience and hard work we succeed where others do not. We recruit from the social care sector, ex-military (very close to our hearts) and ex- police service but ultimately, we want people who are caring, flexible, resilient, loyal, tough and will see the task through to the end. We have operated from County Durham up in the North East right down to Chichester in West Sussex.
Although our core work is crisis placements for challenging children our full range of services include, personal care, placement stability, appropriate adult services, gangs/county lines interventions and secure/non secure transportation and training services and we operate 24/7 365 days of the year.
“Doing What Others Wont”