Croham Services for Children

In 2008 Laura Ritchie, Chris Brann and Fergus Smith, who for many years have worked together in local authorities and for CAE Ltd, assumed ownership of Croham Care Services and launched Croham Services for Children (SfC).

Laura, Chris and Fergus have substantial experience of developing and managing local authority fostering, residential and many other services and (through consultancy work) an appreciation of how to work effectively as an independent provider with local authority commissioners.

In addition to recruiting more foster carers, our Contact Centre is proving more and more popular.

Our aims

Our aims remain unchanged:

• To be the best in London and southern England, and
• Over time, to be recognised as such

Ofsted (the government organisation that inspects independent fostering agencies like SfC) has already rated our services as 'good'. Next time we are inspected, we are determined to achieve an 'outstanding' evaluation - the best there is!

We pride ourselves on the personal touch. As Directors we know all our carers and all the children they look after and all the families and children that use the Contact Centre.

Our Contact Centre is highly rated by all who use it and provides a safe, professional and welcoming environment for families and children.

Find out more about us and why we are confident that we will achieve these aims »

Recent achievements

During March 2011 we have on behalf of the Department for Education facilitated regional briefings for all English local authorities on the revised regulatory framework for looked after children (Putting Care Into Practice) . We are now able to use this experience to offer briefings and more in depth training to individual agencies. Find out more about our training/briefing sessions.

As well as being approved providers of fostering services for all London councils, we are preferred providers for a number of individual local authorities. We are also preferred providers of supervised contact services for a south London borough.
 

Further information

Full details of our services can be found in the relevant section of this website. You can also see video streams outlining our Fostering Service at www.services-for-children.org.uk/fostering and our Contact Centre at www.services-for-children.org.uk/contact.