Church of England Homes was an agency of the Sydney Anglican Diocese that ran children’s homes in Sydney and the Blue Mountains. It was created around 1884 by Reverend TB Tress and Reverend Dr Manning, in Woolloomooloo, and grew to take in several committees that had operated in the Sydney area. Church of England Homes is not to be confused with Church of England Homes Burwood, which ran the Bishop Wigg Memorial Home.
Church of England Homes grew out of what had been a committee of the Church of England Temperance Society. The committee was established in 1884 with the purpose of opening a Rescue Home for women and girls in the Sydney area. This home opened in 1885, moving between rented premises in Sydney for several years before settling at Strathmore in Glebe in 1899. This site in Glebe was to be the main site of activity for the committee for the next 40 years. By 1900 the committee had become known as the Church of England Rescue Home Society. For 20 years the Rescue Home was the only institution run by the society until the establishment of their first children’s home in 1904, the Church of England Home for Girls, which was located at Avona, a neighbouring property to the Rescue Home. In 1909 the society opened its second Home for girls on the Glebe site, the Tress-Manning Home, named after the society’s founders. These expansions were funded by profits from laundry work done by women in the rescue home, as well as public donations and sales of handcrafts made by children in the girls’ Homes. At this time the society began discussing the removal of the word ‘rescue’ from it’s title, due to the stigma associated with the term, which was seen as unsuitable for its work at the two girls’ Homes. The name Church of England Homes was gradually adopted over the next few years.
By 1914 the Church of England Homes had decided to expand away from the city, and into the countryside, which was seen to be as more beneficial to the children. In 1914 ‘Minden’ at Carlingford was purchased as a country home for girls, and was named the Carlingford Children’s Home. There was also a high demand for a Home for boys. In 1918 the society established their first Boys’ Home in rented premises at Cronulla, but soon decided to move the boys into the Carlingford Home. In 1919 the girls were moved out of Carlingford and into a new Home at Glebe called Arden. The boys moved into Minden in 1920, where a new building called the No.2 home had been constructed to allow for increased numbers.
In 1922 the Church Rescue Home closed and the remaining adult women moved to another location to enable Strathmore to be used as another girls’ home to meet the growing numbers of applications for admission into the Glebe Homes.
At the beginning of 1925 a ‘Big Forward Movement’ was launched, with the aim of establishing a new boys’ Home and transferring the girls from Glebe to the boys’ Home site at Carlingford. On 14 April 1928 boys went into residence on a new site at Carlingford, not far from Minden, which had previously been used as a farm by the Boys’ Home. Girls were then gradually sent to Minden over 1928 and 1929, and the homes at Glebe were closed. In September 1929 the new Church of England Home for Girls at Carlingford was officially opened. Carlingford was now the base for the Church of England Homes.
The following year, 1930, the Homes and Hostels Committee of the Church of England Home Mission Society and the Church of England Homes Committee merged to both operate under the Church of England Homes title. This would enable both committees to combine their funds and fundraising efforts, and provide more consistent and economical management of the Homes. The result of this merge was the Havilah Homes for Little Children and the Quipolli Children’s Home, which had both been run by the Homes and Hostels Committee, became part of Church of England Homes. Quipolli was closed in 1936, but Havilah continued to run as the committee’s primary Home for infants, toddlers, and very young children, and relocated to the Carlingford Boys’ Home site in 1950.
By 1959, the 75th anniversary of Church of England Homes, 288 children were in the care of the committee. Havilah held 32 children aged from two to six. At that time, there were 134 boys and 72 girls in care with Church of England Homes. During this period, all children’s Homes run by the Church of England Homes committee were located at Carlingford, with the exception of two holiday homes at Terrigal and Warrawillah for the Carlingford children to use.
The Church of England Homes began to transition in the late 1960s as attitudes to out of home ‘care’ for children began to change and the number of children at the Home continued to decrease. The preference for care models shifted to the use of family group homes, which better resembled a typical family environment compared to the old institutional-style buildings with large dormitories. Through the 1970s and 1980s the Church of England Homes established Family Group Homes in Sydney’s North-Western suburbs, and some buildings at the Carlingford Girls and Boys Homes were renovated to better fit the family group home model. Many of these new Homes were given names that had previously been used for other Church of England Homes and buildings, or took the names of prominent members of staff, committee members, and financial donors. The Family Group Homes included: Crecy Group Home, Orana Group Home, Buckland Group Home, Kingsleigh Group Home, Marella Aboriginal Temporary Care, Havilah Group Home, Cornwell Group Home,
The shift towards smaller models of care continued through the 1970s. In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald in 1978 the CEO of the Church of England Homes stated that it wasn’t unusual for children who had grown up in the large institutional-style Homes to be unprepared for life after the Home, and to get in trouble with police, ending up in a “home institution, jail institution” cycle. For this reason, as well as the increasing number of temporary placements over permanent placements, the Church of England Homes had decided to close the large Homes at Carlingford and focus their efforts exclusively on Family Group Homes and Foster Care.
Church of England Homes was replaced by Care Force in 1984, becoming part of the Anglican Home Mission Society.