Local company bought out by employees

There is more exciting business news to share, with a company based both in Welshpool and across the border announcing a staff buy-out.

Amberleigh have been operating from their site at Golfa Hall since 2004, providing specialist therapeutic care and education services.

We caught up with the company’s Managing Director, Dr Kevin Gallagher, to find out why it has happened, and what the future holds for its more than 100 staff.

When and where was the company originally formed?

The service was founded in 2004 with Golfa Hall, Welshpool, being the original site. We have grown organically over the last 21 years, gradually improving the site and resources, opening a second site in Shropshire in 2012 which has had further investment, and then expanding the Welshpool site when we purchased our neighbouring property and incorporated this into the Golfa Hall site.

What services does the company provide and where does it operate?

Amberleigh is one of the UKs leading specialist therapeutic care and education services and is operating in Welshpool and over the border in Shropshire. We work with looked-after children, specifically boys agreed 11-18, who have all had extremely dysfunctional early lives, typically involving multiple abuses and who have multiple emotional and behavioural needs as a result of trauma.

We deliver this specialist practice on behalf of local authorities across, but not limited to, Wales. The two sites each comprise of a deliberately large children’s home, our own independent schools and an in-house clinical team of therapists. These three different strands are integrated into an evidence-based therapeutic structure called a Therapeutic Community (TC) which harnesses the therapeutic learning power of groups and relationships – hence why they are deliberately larger groups.

Both our communities are fully accredited by the Royal College of Psychiatrists – Golfa Hall, Welshpool is the only accredited therapeutic service in Wales, and these are two of only seven such services for children across the whole of the UK. This is long term, relational work, and the boys make significant progress in all aspects of their functioning, enabling them to lead fuller and more successful lives when they do move on from us – usually after two-three years.

What brought about the staff buy-out?

The service had been looking for a route to secure sustainable funding and to allow a staged and managed approach to succession planning. For a technical and specialist service, it is important that the knowledge and evidence base that underpins the work (and the outcomes for children) were protected and built into the ownership of the service for the future.

There has been an ongoing increase in the involvement of private equity backed businesses in children’s social care and we wanted to find an alternative route that was more sustainable and ethical. As our service operates in both Wales and England, we also needed to take account of the different policy agendas in the two nations and how the children’s social care sector is evolving. Employee Ownership was a model we were introduced to in Wales through Cwmpas and we were immediately excited about the suitability of this approach in responding to wider challenges in the system.

How has this secured the future of the company?

The service is now 100% owned by the employees collectively and this is overseen and governed by a legal Trust. As the Trust is formed, it has a governance document which sets out all the principles and values by which the organisation will be run – this is where the sense of employee voice, social good, reinvestment of profits, engagement in research, sharing of practice and all those elements that deliver the quality and value are ‘baked in’ to the very structure.

In a private service, these factors would be down to the individual choices of the directors and shareholders – which of course can change under new ownership or management, but now they are guaranteed and protected ensuring the service will continue to operate on the strong principles on which it has evolved.

The change of structure is something that we had been discussing with the management team for over a year as the plans unfolded and was then communicated to all staff in late February this year.

We found that in terms of the principles of employee ownership – transparency, high levels of employee representation and voice, involvement in decision making and consultation – as a values-based, therapeutic service, we already had all of these in place and this was another reason that staff were able to feel confident in the change. We now have a formal Employee Representative Trustee on our new board to contribute to the oversight.

What are the future plans for the company?

In the short term, there are no changes – the management and leadership remain consistent, and we will continue to grow organically on our two sites. We expanded our capacity in Welshpool back in 2022 and continue to grow into this. In the next two years we expect to add a further seven places at our Shropshire site, replicating the successful model we have in Wales. This is all part of our continued commitment to supporting Local Authorities in accessing high quality, technical and specialist services for groups of vulnerable children. Sadly, the need for these services is increasing and it is those services with defined models of care, therapeutic and clinical input and specialist education which are most in demand. We will continue to be involved in sharing practice, local community work, research, charitable activities and supporting a local supply chain.

Are you looking to recruit more staff?

The service is always interested to hear from people who feel they can make a valuable contribution to the lives of the young people and we have a diversity of ages, background and experience across the teams. We provide very comprehensive training and support and this is something that existing staff really value and benefit from – in part evidenced by our Investors in People Gold Award which we have held for the last eight years and have just re-achieved. In the next two years we would expect to create a further 20 jobs in various roles to add to the existing workforce of over 100 people. Almost everyone is employed to work with the young people, so we don’t have a separate head office or layer of management – it is a very ‘community’ feel in the day to day.

Is there anything else that you would like to add that would be of interest to our readers?

The service provides a very technical and evidence-based approach to practice, and the multi-disciplinary working model is almost impossible to recreate in the public sector. It is also delivered at significantly lower cost than the public sector, something that is very important and pertinent in the context of overall rising costs and statistically poor outcomes in the children’s social care system. We are delighted that this change now protects and secures those benefits into the future – but most importantly, it works for the young people and provides them with the love, care, nurture, boundaries and protection that they need to move forwards in their lives and into society.