Hooray! Christmas has finally arrived and for some reason I have been really looking forward to it this year – maybe because last Christmas all our plans were dashed by the Covid lockdown, (the most excitement we had was a drink in my mother-in-laws garage in the freezing cold), or maybe because 2021 has been an incredibly busy year for The Owl Centre and me, and I’m looking forward to a little rest (this picture of me last Saturday just about sums it all up).
To share a short summary of the year, we have been working hard on many things:
- Continuing our pursuit to provide the very best assessment and therapy services to support families and schools who need some top-up care which always continues to be our number 1 motivator!
- A wing of the Owl Centre became a charity in September 2020 and we are really keen to expand this – but I wish someone had warned me that running a charity was INCREDIBLY hard work!
- We wonderfully became CQC registered this month. CQC is the Health Care equivalent to Ofsted and is a governing body which, believe it or not, we applied to be inspected by! After 3 fairly intensive and stressful interviews with Rods and me, it’s done and we did it – phew! We’ll be inspected fairly regularly from now on (although not too soon into the New Year I hope).
- We have recently picked up our 6th NHS contract to help with waiting lists for Speech and Language Therapy, OT and Autism diagnostic assessment / post-diagnostic care. We have also branched out into the disability departments of some Universities, Imperial College being our latest, which is gorgeous at Christmas time.
- All the little training projects and supervision sessions we run to ensure our, ever expanding team of therapists are the very best they can be which has led us to start an Owl Centre Academy next year.
- Organising our first Owl Centre conference for 1st July 2022. Please save the date!
- Developing a little acorn of an ADHD assessment and treatment service – watch this space…
- And of course, celebrating The Owl Centre’s 10th Birthday this month. I can hardly believe it, and wowzers – a lot has happened in those years (a bit more about that below), and although the advise is, never to mix work with relationships, someone Rods and I are ok, in fact I will go as far to say that we are good!
(Although, I’ll tell you one thing that has gone by the way side – the social media! It’s on my New Year’s Resolution list I promise).
This year we also said bye bye to our wonderful admin support, Emily (who has gone back to teaching), and we recruited our fabulous Kate in May and Jo in September. They are so amazing and I have to pinch myself that they’re part of our team. ❤️❤️❤️
So, with a warm glow in my heart, I want to say thanks to all our clients (children and adults), families, schools, colleagues in the NHS and general supporters or flag wavers of The Owl Centre! We really hope you have a wonderful Christmas, and a very happy and healthy 2022.
Nicola and all of us at The Owl Centre
xxx
