Wiltshire Wildlife Trust currently has two Care Farms: Lakeside, near Oaksey and The Willows, in Broughton Gifford.
We are the first of The Wildlife Trusts to successfully develop and run a Care Farm. Both Care Farms have been awarded the Social Farms & Gardens Green Care Quality Mark.
Care Farms provide a supervised, programme of farming-related activities. There are now around 180 Care Farms in the UK, each showing how contact with nature has a powerful role to play in helping those with mental ill-health, autism, social and communication difficulties, disabilities, and those in need of emotional support.
Each Care Farm varies in how it meet local needs and can offer individual and group interactions over the course of days, weeks, months or years, providing or promoting healing, mental health, social or educational care services. They provide opportunities for social interaction, skills-building and purposeful work.
Our students are varied in age and specific needs. Each is an individual and is treated as such. Our age range has been 4-63, but has narrowed recently to 5-19 as funding for adult Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) groups has become more difficult to secure. Many have diagnoses based around mental health, or are diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Condition (ASC), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), and Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), whilst others have experienced childhood trauma.
Many of our students fall under the category of additional needs referred to as Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) and thus have anxieties and challenges of varying origins that affect their everyday lives, particularly in a busy school setting where their anxieties surface. Whatever the reason they are with us we look beyond the student we read about on their paperwork to look at the individual in front of us.