Action for Children (formerly National Children's Home) is a UK children's charity created to help vulnerable children & young people and their families in the UK. The charity has 7,000 staff and volunteers who operate over 475 services in the UK. They served a total of 368,648 children in 2019 and 2020. Action for Children's national headquarters is in Watford, and it is a registered charity under English and Scottish law. In 2017/2018, it had a gross income of £151 million. History The first 'Children's Home', a renovated stable in Church Street, Waterloo, was founded in 1869 by Methodist minister Thomas Bowman Stephenson, who had been moved by the plight of children living on the street in London. The first two boys were admitted on 9 July 1869. In 1871 the home was moved to Bonner Road, Victoria Park, and girls were admitted. The home was approved by the Wesleyan Methodist Conference in the same year. A year later, in 1872, a second home opened in Edgworth, Lancashire. The homes were divided into small family units run by a 'house mother' and 'house father', which was in marked contrast to the large institutions and workhouses common at the time. Training was also an important aspect. A childcare course was set up in 1878 and the graduates of this programme – who were called 'the Sisterhood' or 'the Sisters of the Children' – went on to work in the Home. An Industrial School at Milton, Gravesend, was taken over in 1875 and a children's refuge in Ramsey on the Isle of Man established in 1882. With the opening of the Princess Alice Orphanage in Birmingham the Home was renamed to 'Children's Home and Orphanage'. Further properties in Alverstoke, Hampshire; Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire; Frodsham, Cheshire; and Bramhope near Leeds were acquired and, by 1908, the charity had grown to become the 'National Children's Home and Orphanage'. In 1913 work began on a large site in Harpenden, which became home to over 200 children, with a print works for apprentices. It subsequently became the charity's head office. Many other new branches and schools were founded, including the first residential nursery branch in Sutton Coldfield in 1929 and the first Scottish branch in Glasgow in 1955. The charity became an adoption agency in 1926. The Rev. Gordon Barritt, who became the head of NCH in 1969, started the process of closing the organisation's children's