About Kids First

The Kids First SA team is made up of a group of highly experienced professionals. We are constantly learning from each other and believe that through collaborative practice and sharing knowledge, ideas and skills we will be able to offer schools and families a service that is truly integrated and most importantly, we hope, effective.

At Kids First we believe that a Team Around the Child (TAC) is key to effective intervention and support. This ‘Team’ includes family/friends, professionals and teachers/staff, all of whom play an important role in helping a child reach his/her full potential.  When you come to Kids First for support, you can expect to be engaged in therapy and we will up-skill you so that you feel confident to help your own child. You can also expect us to engage with your child’s teacher / key staff members so that they are aware of what we’re doing and can integrate strategies in a more natural context.

We believe that listening to and working WITH parents helps facilitate progress. Therefore, when your child enters Kids First, we will want to support YOU to understand how YOU can help your child at home. We will give you simple and FUN activities to incorporate into your daily routines. Throughout your time at Kids First SA, you are likely to:

1. Attend some of the therapy sessions (or part of some sessions)

2. Do easy homework tasks throughout the week / between sessions (these are usually easy to integrate into your daily routine)

3. Attend some of our parent workshops and training sessions

All interventions and approaches adopted by Kids First will be research and evidenced-based, a founding principle of our UK Company Words First Ltd. There are many ‘interventions’ out there that claim to do miraculous things for children but many of these are not based on scientific research and lack the evidence to substantiate the claims.

Our role is to sift through the wealth of information out there and to select interventions that are well researched with excellent evidence bases. To do this, we tap into the expertise of many international approaches and rely on the interventions we know work in the UK.

Our only goal is to support your child to reach his / her potential. Many children do not require ongoing therapy for years – after accurate identification of the underlying cause, they may just require a shorter burst of intervention. Once we have set SMART targets with the child’s team, we will start working towards these. At an agreed date, we will review your child’s progress and discuss further action with you.

You have come on a long and sometimes emotional ‘journey’ to get to us at Kids First and you have decided to invest crucial funds into helping your child. We want you to see progress (and remember, progress is usually measured in relation to YOUR child, not other children, and progress can be made in tiny steps). We believe that you should see therapy working and therefore we will always keep you posted regarding your child’s progress.