Curve Balls and Calm Voices: Progress Charts a New Path for Complex Placements
On a recent weekday morning, Carla, the therapeutic development officer at the Oftsed-outstanding Progress Fostering Service, posed the question that frames every support session she runs: Who is this child beyond the label?
“Every child is completely individual, regardless of their background and needs,” she regularly tells foster carers when they gather during one of her several sessions with them, at Progress House, elsewhere or online.
That premise, that diagnoses illuminate but do not define, has guided Progress as it navigates a surge of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). The number of such referrals has doubled since the pandemic, stretching Britain’s 56,000‑strong fostering network.
To meet the demand, Progress leverages the Solihull Approach, a 12‑week programme that Carla leads several times a year. When carers first hear the length, she said, “they usually think, Twelve weeks? That’s a long time.” But by the final session, the mood shifts. “It’s a celebration of how far they’ve come,” she added, noting the friendships that form around the homework tasks of quiet observation and written reflection.
The core lesson is disarmingly simple: notice your own state before responding to a child. “Breathe, just take a moment first,” Carla tells carers confronting meltdowns in soft‑play centres or frantic school‑run departures. “If you’re hyped up, the child is going to mirror that.”
Foster carers say the advice helps. “It’s like first aid for the brain,” one participant volunteered after the session, comparing the pause to the stop‑and‑assess mantra taught on emergency‑response courses.
Progress is also piloting the Berry assessment, a structured questionnaire that tracks how a child behaves at school versus at home. “It really breaks down and looks at the areas of need,” Carla said. When the answers diverge sharply, she convenes a team‑around‑the‑child meeting to recalibrate support plans.
The method has already revealed masked anxiety in two children and led to tweaks in classroom seating and playground routines. “You can’t fix everything,” Carla cautioned, “but you can reduce the curve balls.”
Teaching the art of rupture and repair
The course spends a full session on what clinicians call rupture and repair—the cycle of conflict and reconciliation common in any family, but especially acute when past trauma shadows the dinner table. Foster carers, Carla said, possess something professional training cannot supply. “They’ve got the biggest hearts, and that’s something you can’t teach.”
She tries, instead, to give them language. One exercise asks carers to juggle an unexpected demand, mimicking the sensory overload a child might feel. “That’s how your child feels,” she tells them afterward.
Progress, which marks its 25th anniversary next month, now supports numerous fostering households. It hosts children’s clubs, support groups and impromptu phone triage, “Can I just have two minutes?” is a common request, to keep placements afloat between formal appointments.
The agency’s culture, Carla said, is summed up in the phrase she repeats to nervous newcomers: “We’re a family, and you’re part of it now.” Her message for the anniversary echoes that refrain. “Keep doing what you’re doing. Everyone is amazing, especially the children,” she said.
Britain must recruit an estimated 8,000 additional foster carers to meet current demand, the Fostering Network says. Many of the hardest‑to‑place children carry complex diagnoses. Progress’ blend of clinical insight and kitchen‑table pragmatism offers one model for how agencies can prepare carers for that reality — and, in the process, remind them to breathe.