The Create Centre learns the language of business - January 2009

Social Enterprise

Click Here for Video Case Study  

Creating a social service through play

The Create Centre was born from Vicky Beasley’s passion for the playability programme. Playability is a model that uses developmental play, also known as free play, to strengthen families through imagination and reflective listening. It fits in to health and education very neatly and is something that can be taken out and delivered in schools and the community. 

The Create Centre was established in 2006 and offers play therapy for children and young people, filial therapy for families and counselling for parents. Their mission is to promote the physical and emotional development of children and young people through therapeutic play. The Create Centre aims to support parents/carers and encourage them to enter the child's world of play and imagination, helping children who often suffer from social emotional and behavioural problems, to grow in confidence, to explore and learn.

Their work within education and health has had some very good results and once they were able to gather some data to show how effective it was they were able to approach other settings such as Councils. Vicky, who is based in Houghton on the Hill, Leicestershire, wanted to present her model with evidence that it really works and can really make a difference to the mental health of children and their families. However, she was lacking in business expertise. So they went along to a Business Champions event to seek help with implementing an established business plan and developing a business model to maximise revenues, including through negotiating effective contracts with Local Authorities and other bodies to ensure future revenue generation. It was at the Business Champions Social Enterprise event that took place in March 2008 that they were introduced to Business Champion Ian Sterritt, Innovation Mentor of Kirkdale Customer Advocates.

Ian Sterritt took part in the Create Centre’s workshop and immediately recognised that Vicky “was a person who had a product quite different within the social services context and that could offer extra value where it hadn’t been addressed before”. He was keen to offer her the help she needed to help the Create Centre achieve their goals. Ian’s extensive business background includes some public sector work where he was involved in selling software in to local authorities, and it was this specific expertise that made him the perfect fit. He recognised that her customer base was in effect the local authorities, particularly the social services within those organisations.

Vicky is keen to credit Ian for the knowledge and skills he’s brought to the Create Centre. She said, “working with Ian has had a massive impact on our business, I’ve gone from being a practitioner to leading the business side, so I’ve been able to develop my skills personally, that of my staff team and been able to look at things in a completely different light.”

Ian’s role has involved giving Vicky someone to bounce ideas off about what’s critical and what she should be doing next. The business, since Ian’s been involved has grown massively and changed significantly they’ve gone from being a small organisation with big ideas to a business with a better skills set, enabling them to go out and get contracts with local authorities and councils.

Ian has been impressed with the progress that’s been made, “for the period that I’ve been involved with Vicky and the Centre, it’s gone from one centre with three staff to 10 centres now with at least 20 staff involved and a contract with Melton Borough Council.” With Ian’s help they’ve proven that its possible for people other than Vicky to deliver the playability programme using the techniques and models that she’s developed and there’s actually scope for it to be extended much further as a technique to councils in other areas and potential for it to become a flag ship programme that can really make a difference.

Vicky has learnt so much from working with Ian and, having secured tendering work from a local council, is now in a position to replicate the model with other authorities. Vicky comments, “our latest success has come about through Business Champion involvement, we need the Business Champions to work with us still, so that we’ve got a sustainable outcome to the Create Centre and the national projects that we’d like to put in place.”