Chief Operating Officer

**Chief Executive Officer**

This is a great opportunity to use your skills, experience and passion to shape the future of the Mulberry Bush and to further strengthen and develop its specialist therapeutic services for transforming the lives of all those affected by childhood trauma..

The Mulberry Bush residential school and children’s home delivers outstanding, transformative practice for children displaced from their families and communities by the effects of early relational trauma. And our outreach, research and ‘Third Space’ reflective practice services understand that the effects of trauma impact families and wider professional networks too. We believe we have knowledge and experience to share and are committed to exchanging insights and findings with service users, practitioners, stakeholders, funders and researchers in the field.

We are now recruiting for a Chief Executive Officer to give direction and vision to our senior leadership team. This is a crucial role at a key moment in our 74-year history. You will be expected to work from your own core professional values, rooted in trauma-informed and therapeutic community practice, and you will be able to evidence a deep understanding and substantial experience of psychodynamic, collaborative and reflective ways of working.

Zoe Lattimer, Chair of the Board of Trustees

About Us

Since 1948, the Mulberry Bush not-for-profit charity has been pioneering milieu-based residential therapeutic child care and specialist education for some of the most vulnerable children in the UK. Our founder, Barbara Dockar Drysdale, worked alongside Donald Winnicott and continues to be a world-renowned figure in the field of understanding and helping troubled children.

Today, our rural site in Standlake, Oxfordshire includes a new state-of-the art children’s home providing 52-week provision, other family-style homes providing a 38-week provision, and beautifully appointed classrooms and gardens in our specialist primary school. Together, these make up ‘The Mulberry Bush School’, which consistently achieves ‘Outstanding’ Ofsted ratings.

Collaborative partnerships with families, referring authorities and other involved agencies are central to our work and we have an international reputation for advancing education, training and research in the field of trauma-informed therapeutic practice.

Our Outreach service provides consultation and support to a range of children’s services as well as offering the award-winning Foundation Degree in Therapeutic Work with Children and Young People, in collaboration with the University of the West of England.

The Mulberry Bush is also committed to research in the field of therapeutic education and residential and foster care. It has a track record of commissioning academic research into its therapeutic processes and outcomes, and of knowledge exchange with academic and other childcare professional services to disseminate findings about best practice.

Our newest service, the Mulberry Bush ‘Third Space’, is a recently acquired site in peaceful woodland and meadowland offering residential and conference or event accommodation. Located in Toddington, Gloucestershire, ‘MB3’ houses archives from the Planned Environment Therapy Trust and the National Childcare Library.

All our services cohere around our mission, to transform the lives of all those affected by childhood trauma, through specialist therapeutic services.

We deliver our mission through our therapeutic community values, recognizing equality between people and the ability of each of us to help and heal others and to contribute to their development.

And we hold to these values through three simple principles:

- The use of a psychodynamic approach in our work, to understand the meaning behind behaviour and what it is communicating
- A commitment to learning through reflection on individual and collective experience
- A belief in an integrated and collaborative approach across all our services and partnerships
The Chief Executive Officer will be responsible to the Board of Trustees for the leadership and direction of the Mulberry Bush, involving the review, implementation and management of the organisation and its strategic plan to develop activities in accordance with the charity’s mission and values.

Because we work with people who have experienced or are working with childhood trauma, our staff are put in touch with complex and powerful feelings. At times members of our community are managing personally stressful and demanding situations. We are looking for an individual with the confidence to lead by example, heartening and encouraging staff through sharing their own personal understanding and showing resilience and dedication in the face of the work.

Key Objectives

To provide leadership to the Mulberry Bush and to oversee the development of the organisation by:

- Reviewing and further developing the strategic plan with the Board of Trustees and