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
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