Directions Project, Irvine

The Directions Project, Irvine supports children aged 7-12 years and their families in the North Ayrshire area. Staff help children address difficulties, including challenging behaviour, possible or actual offending behaviour, and help them to stay with their family, in their school and community.

A key part of helping children involves working with their parents on issues such as parenting skills and helping them access services and activities in their community.

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When Tom (10) came to the Project, both he and his parents needed help in coping more effectively with his behaviour: he was putting himself at risk of becoming involved in offending, he was regularly running away from home, and he was at risk of being excluded from school.

With his project workers, Tom identified a number of issues which he himself felt he needed to address to allow him to manage his own behaviour and assist his parents to support him. These included his targets to reduce his running away, control his anger, use alternative coping strategies to address his risky behaviour and express his feelings effectively.

Tom initially worked on an individual basis with his project worker before attending a groupwork programme on anger management with five other young people.

Tom's school now reports that he is becoming more academically able: when he struggles in the classroom he now uses appropriate coping mechanisms to deal with difficult conflict situations; he is more confident at expressing his feelings; he understands the process of his angry behaviour so can move from the trigger stage through to resolving his feelings appropriately. Overall he has a lot more self-confidence.

Tom attended the official launch of the three Directions projects in January 2004, and talked about his reasons for attending the project. He was able to verbalise his angry feelings and his solutions for resolving these difficult issues.

If you would like to access this service, you can find contact details in our Services Contact List.

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