A Brief History of

Farcliffe & Lilycroft Children & Family Centre

Past

Farcliffe was originally a private house. It became Farcliffe Day Nursery during the Second World War and was funded by the Health Department.

The day nursery offered childcare for parents who were working and open long hours with many children eating all of their daily meals there. Charges were made for nursery attendance but a grading system had been introduced which fixed the charges according to income.

In approximately 1971/72 Social Services took over the responsibility for the day nursery.

By this time there was a need for services to be prioritised.

Single working parents were high priority. Charges were still made but a fixed rate was introduced with a system of appeal which allowed charges to be adjusted. In October 1980 a Special Needs Unit was developed within the Centre to offer respite and play activities for 10 children per day. There was a gradual shift to working with families and the increase in demand for child protection work led to the change from Day Nursery to Family Centre.

This brought about a whole new way for the staff who moved from a solely child orientated base to an adult and child  focus. Farcliffe Day Nursery thus became Farcliffe Family Centre in 1988.

The next major change took place when our special needs provision was transferred to Canterbury Children’s Centre as part of the centralisation of special needs services in Bradford West. In April 1997, and following an internal review of all the family centre services in Bradford West, Farcliffe and Kensington Family Centres amalgamated to form Bradford West Resource Services. On 1st of January 1999 we had another change of name and reverted back to being Farcliffe Family Centre.

Please click on the pictures below - they will open up into PDFs.

Present

Farcliffe family Centre provides various group activities on a daily basis from child only groups to parent groups (you will receive more information in the different rooms).

Family Resource Workers’ main responsibilities are to work with individual families in their won homes or within a family friendly building their work includes advice, support and assessments in relation to their families.

All our work with service users is reviewed on a regular basis and future plans are made. This enables the families to be directly involved in how their situation in progressing and how they feel circumstances should move on.

Our Development Officer has established a number of links between other agencies including, voluntary sector, local schools, clinics and the B.R.I. This service has enabled different authorities/agencies to jointly run groups for families and young children, sharing staff skills, knowledge and resource.

The Centre has a Newsletter that comes out quarterly and a website that is frequently updates with useful information, jobs etc.

In April 2011 our library was opened and an allotment-project in Manningham was created for parents and children from the centre to access.

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