and reach thousands of daily visitors
4 AUGUST 2008
NO 1329
The Mulberry Bush School
The Mulberry Bush School exists specifically for the care, education and residential treatment of up to 36 seriously emotionally damaged children aged 5 -12, who have failed to develop a secure sense of ego integration and identity. Consequently, these children are unable to manage themselves in age appropriate ways or allow others to do so for them. They are, in D.W Winnicott's terms, unintegrated (Winnicott, 1965).
The children who come to the school have suffered serious and repeated interruptions to their emotional care and nurture at an early age. Often this has been due to neglect, physical, emotional or sexual abuse, which has led to the development of severe behavioural problems. Many of the children have never moved beyond primitive levels of development and functioning. Due to this early environmental failure and at times to later traumatic experiences, they are often chaotic, impulsive, unpredictable, and unable to function in a group without disruption. Such behaviours are often present to an extreme degree.
The school was founded on its current site in 1948 in the village of Standlake, approximately 10 miles west from the city of Oxford, by Barbara and Stephen Dockar-Drysdale. The school itself evolved from Barbara Dockar-Drysdale's efforts during the repeated evacuations and social upheavals of WW2 to care for children with emotional and behavioural problems evacuated from the London blitz to the safety of rural Oxfordshire.
In 1946 the Curtis Committee was set up by the Government to investigate the death of a child called Dennis O'Neill who had died in 1945 from abuse and neglect at the hands of his parents. Amongst the committee's recommendations, it urged for the formation of residential child guidance clinics to support and manage the psychological needs of disturbed youngsters, until they were able to be reintegrated into their birth or substitute families. It is out of this government policy, and backed by the then Ministry of Education (who had received positive reports about the work of the school) that `the Bush' came into being, with the dual purpose of providing both treatment and education for severely emotionally troubled children.
The original `Bush' consisted of the Dockar-Drysdales and their young family sharing the farmhouse with this group of grossly emotionally deprived children. The original model, on which the work was built then, was a familial one. Barbara, firstly finding a way on her own, then via her consultations with D.W. Winnicott, and eventually through her psychotherapy training, provided the localised therapeutic engagements with the youngsters, the psychological nurture that they were so in need of. Stephen, along with his farming activities, provided the boundary setting and the `live' authority for the group. In this sense the fledgling unit offered a very clear demarcation between traditional parental roles. With time the Drysdales were able to employ a few staff to support the endeavour, and from here the school grew.
JOHN DIAMOND
Diamond, John. (2003).
Who's in charge here? Managing the mess. Therapeutic Communities, 24,
1. pp. 6-7.
REFERENCE
Winnicott, D.W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London. Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.
