For information about The Ark Centre services please email admin@thearkcentre.org. Please note due to our busy centre it is hard for us to get to the phone during the day so please email for a speedy response.

Providing Individualised Therapy for Children with autism, social communication difficulties and developmental delays

The Ark Centre is a purpose-built therapy centre in Chelmsford, Essex offering individualised, early intervention therapy for pre-school age children with autism, social communication difficulties and developmental delays.

We are Ofsted registered and our Occupational and Speech and Language therapists are registered with the HCPC. The Ark opened in June 2015 and we remain the only multidisciplinary early intervention centre for children with autism in Essex.

Our programmes are tailored to each child and devised by our experienced team of Behaviour, Speech and Language and Occupational Therapists. Each programme is mainly delivered on a one-to-one basis, following the principles of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), to bring about meaningful and positive changes in children’s behaviour and well-being. All programmes are supervised by our in house BCBA qualified consultants.

Each day the centre hosts two, 3-hour sessions.  The morning sessions are from 9am to 12noon and the afternoon sessions are from 1.00pm to 4.00pm. Sessions run Monday-Friday for 51 weeks of the year.  Each session has a maximum of 5 children present. We require that each child attends a minimum of 5 sessions per week to ensure they progress at the best possible rate.

For the children that attend The Ark Centre we are able to share our expertise and offer advice to families of children, enabling family members to feel comfortable and confident in the support they are providing their children at home and outside of the centre. Key to the success of any programme is the generalisation of functional skills. To achieve this, partnership working with parents / carers is crucial.

“I cannot recommend The Ark Centre enough. The team of therapists that they have on board are far more superior than any others that I have come across. They are very accurate and thorough in identifying the key areas that our son required intervention and support in, and quickly put a programme in place to assist him with this.

My son has made amazing progress since attending The Ark, more that we could ever have imagined. His quality of life is now so much better and he is becoming more functional and social with his peers, two areas which we saw little or no progress in before starting The Ark Centre.” – Chris O’Donoghue