Hello and Welcome to the Chrysalis Care blog spot


Chrysalis Care is an independent fostering provider, looking after children in London and the home counties. We have been operating since 1997 and have an ‘outstanding’ reputation.

As you will be aware there are many issues and topics highlighted by the media regarding looked after children, foster care, social services and children not being taken into care with tragic consequences.

The Chrysalis Care blog spot will be a forum where some of these topics, issues and other thoughts associated with fostering and looked after children will be discussed by staff, foster carers and perhaps some young people. I hope you enjoy them and please feel free to comment.

Allé Pflaumer, Director

Friday 21 September 2012

Finding the flexible spaces

En route to the office today, I was thinking about the dichotomy we face. There is an emphasis on less bureaucracy, for instance, via the Big (or is it big?) society agenda and the hot topic of ‘delegated authority’. Against this backdrop of more ‘freedom’ to be autonomous, is the increasing demands to evidence that we are undertaking effective practice, for instance requests from Local Authorities to prove that we CRB check our foster carers and staff. It seems that reference to robust systems, policies and procedures and being rated Outstanding by Ofsted is not enough. But that’s not the main point of this blog…..

….within this risk averse, highly legislated context, we need to maintain our ability to be creative, to be innovative, to respect our status as ‘Independent’ providers. We must hold onto this. The temptation is to become almost robotic in our response to the almost overbearing ‘requests’ for information and to lose sight of our own capacity to ‘find the flexible spaces’ that surely exist. We have known for a long time, that there is no ‘one size fits all’ and that in order to provide high quality care for children and young people, we need to be able to, as far as possible, respect the uniqueness of each situation.

After all, we are not selling refrigerators.

Joanna Oliver

Strategic Development Executive