About Us

About The Dog, Duck and Cat Trust

The Trust provides educational, preventative, harm minimisation resources for young people, aged 0 to 9 years of age, with a focus on safeguarding, promoting safety and developing a child’s resilience.

The approach is simple yet effective. The Dog, Duck and Cat characters are utilised, in story form, to help adults educate children about a range of different subjects. The resources have also been created to allow older children to use them for themselves, thus increasing opportunities for the messages to be delivered to our audience. The resources are available online, but the Trust endeavour to make printed resources available whenever possible, as children have told us they ‘like having the story books and activities to play with'. For the Trust to be able to reach the children, partnership working is essential. We work with professionals, in the community, in settings such as primary schools, the NHS, early years providers, and the local authority. All partners are then supported, in a variety of ways, to use the DDC resources. All of the stories are supported by lesson plans and classroom activities, for use by those working in educational settings, and bespoke programmes have been developed to suit the needs of specific professionals, such as health visitors, midwives, libraries and others.

The Trust also provides a full set of story resources for Parents, Carers and Guardians (PCG) and the local community to use. To keep children safe, the homes they live in, and the people that care for them, need to be aware of the risks that those children may face. PCG’s and the local community are vital partners for the Trust, to omit them would vastly diminish the chances of us achieving our aims.

For PCG’s we are also promoting the concept of spending Quality Time with their child(ren). By providing story resources, and activities to be done together, we are looking to those that have children in their care, to ‘put down the phone’ and spend some fun-time with their children.

By doing this we are looking to create positive attachments. This can be a tremendous way to build a child’s Trust, resilience and thus encourage them to be open and talk if they are ever concerned, worried or scared about anything.

The focus, until the end of 2017, had been on helping children stay safe from accidents, but the remit has now been broadened due to demand. Emotional well-being, bereavement, loss, domestic abuse, positive peer relationships, racism, and a range of other subjects, are now being addressed by DDC resources.

Aims of the DDC Trust

For children to learn about staying safe, in a way that is fun and age appropriate, in their day to day lives and in their local community
To address, and educate on, subjects that affect a child’s mental health and emotional well being online courses
To promote ‘safety first’ thinking, both inside the home and in the community
To ensure children receive consistent safeguarding messages to prevent household accidents and incidents
To assist Parents, Carers and Guardians (PCG) in building rapport with their children
To promote Quality Time, between PCGs and their children, to build a child’s resilience
To provide resources to facilitate Quality time taking place
To ensure children know, and they believe, that they have a person in their life, that they trust and can to talk to, if they are ever worried or scared about anything, no matter how awful or small their concern may be

Our
Testimonials

"What has Dog, Duck and Cat achieved for our staff and children? Dog, Duck and Cat is an easy usable resource for staff to plan PSHE/Safeguarding lessons around a number of topics which are linked to trends of concerns we have in our school. The lesson plans and resources are easy to use and accessible for teachers and support staff.

These sessions have been used in 1-1, small group and Nurture group intervention. This programme provides use with tools to support our children so they know how to keep themselves safe and to build up resilience from Early Years to Year 6"

Safeguarding Lead

Lyng Primary School

"Our children are learning about senses so by asking the children what things smelt and felt like was helping towards our topic at nursery. It was good when you talked about different dangerous materials and then each child talked about their own thought and ideas "

Nursery School

Blackheath

"My 3 year old little girl and I were in the kitchen. I went to put the washing liquid – tabs away in the cupboard under the sink. She was sat in her high chair watching me and she said, ‘Mommy No!’. I asked her what she meant and she said, ‘Dog, Duck and Cat said put them away safely, that’s not safe!’. My daughter and I had read the 'Keeping people safe' story and it had obviously had an impact on her"