Most of the children referred to Drummond Hall have issues with behaviour and behavioural development, issues that impact on learning and make it hard for them to cope in mainstream settings. These can include violent outbursts, sexualized language and actions, poor motor skills and sensory sensitivities (to loud or repetitive noises). Sometimes the issues are neurological in nature, sometimes they’re the result of traumatic encounters such as domestic abuse. The team uses different diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to assess the students, to understand their experiences and to think about how best to support them.

Nell Nicholson, the former head teacher at another NHS provision, Gloucester House, describes this as a “therapeutic milieu”; the staff, both academic and clinical, work therapeutically, “noticing their own feelings, noticing their interactions with one another, and trying to use that as ‘data’ “ (for example, staff anxieties can be explained in relation to anxieties felt by the students). This approach is grounded in psychoanalytic theory of the sort pioneered at Gloucester House's parent organization, the Tavistock and Portman Clinic. Feelings are not necessarily seen to reside in single individuals, but can be unconsciously exchanged or communicated. The work is also informed by more well-known thinking, of which the most prominent is probably attachment theory.

Attachment theory was pioneered by the psychologist and psychiatrist John Bowlby, who also worked at the Tavistock. The central tenet of attachment theory is that, for infants to develop into emotionally and socially stable people, they require, in their early years, a close, loving relationship with a primary caregiver, also called an “attachment figure”. The psychologist Mary Ainsworth describes this figure – first and foremost the child's biological mother – as a “secure base”. A consistently present primary carer provides the newly born infant with a stable environment.