Our Core Offering

The farm has been designed to offer young people who have complex lives a safe place to progress positively in life. Our programmes include opportunities to learn new skills and develop qualities through using a resilience model and animal assisted therapy.

Young people come to Future Roots for a variety of reasons. These include poor emotional and mental health often displaying associated behaviours such as self-harm or anxiety. They will be struggling to manage mainstream school settings and often displaying risky and concerning behaviours. They are often at risk of exploitation and abuse.

Future Roots has never found it necessary to exclude any young person from a programme. The team are highly experienced in working with young people who have complex behaviour patterns and work in ways that manage these safely and positively. Team members have a range of experience and qualifications which include social work, teaching, family work, outdoors and sports leadership.

Alongside our therapeutic and wellbeing programmes we offer a variety of regulated qualifications including functional skills in Maths, English, Young Health Champion and vocational qualifications in Agriculture and Cooking.

We are also able to explore other qualifications and awards with young people should they have a specific interest. The farm and animal care activities teaches many transferable skills that young people can take with them.

Future Roots has watched young people aged 8-18 turn their lives around on many occasions and they frequently return to share positive stories or ask for advice.

A study, undertaken by Dr Sarah Hambidge in completing her Ph.D. (Bournemouth University 2017) found that young people who attended Future Roots presented as less stressed than those in mainstream school and showed an improvement in their emotional health and wellbeing. The study concluded that the care farm (Rylands and Future Roots) provides an intervention for young people disengaged with education that offers a more positive and effective alternative to mainstream settings.