Putting Children first

Enlightery

We provide caring, safe homes for
looked-after children, with a focus
on high-quality, child-centred care.

What We Do

Enlightery was founded in early 2024 to take over the operation of four residential children’s homes in Surrey, Buckinghamshire and Slough. Our team has worked with young people in care for many years and understand the challenges that exist with providing high-quality, sustainable care in a sector where placement shortages and high costs

Our aim is to increase the provision of high quality in-county homes to help local authorities lower their costs over the long-term whilst working our young people to give them the best possible future prospects.

We specialise in providing solo and dual placement homes for 11 to 17-year-olds at the higher end of the risk spectrum, and pride ourselves on operating with a child-focused approach. Our homes are presented and organised to be as close as a possible to a normal family home environment and this ethos drives our day-to-day decision making.

We are a limited company to allow for access to capital, however we operate as a social enterprise; Our objective is to provide quality care rather than generating financial returns.

What We Care About – our Children and our Staff

What We Do

Let’s keep it simple – we are child-focused!

For Enlightery, being child-focused means making tangible commitments in the day-to-day running of our homes that positively impact the young people in our care. It means putting our young people first when dealing with other stakeholders such as educators, carers, mentors and other institutions. It means carefully matching staff with children and providing a continuity of care that our children can rely on. It means encouraging positive relationship building so that our children can build confidence and equip themselves for the future, when they move on as adults.

Our teams plan regular and one-off activities including weekly sports events, local club memberships as a well as ‘big’ events like Birthdays, Christmas and holidays and, most importantly, those specific events which are the important ones for each young person.

We also have team members that focus on nutrition and food sourcing, as we believe that home-cooked meals are better for our young people and our team and provide an opportunity for re-enforcing the close family-like atmosphere that we strive to achieve in our homes.

Life skills education is often missed from residential care provision. We aim to empower the Young People in their life skills as much as possible, supporting them to learn and develop their independence during their time with us.

Our Staff

Our staff are the life-blood of our homes and we recruit very carefully to achieve balance and diversity with our homes. Whilst we have a core staff team in each home prior to receiving a referral, we will then pay special attention to the chemistry and skills mix need to make the young person settle in and thrive.

Each team member has a personal development plan that provides for future career progression and the training and personal development to achieve that progression.

We understand that care home shift patterns can be challenging when it comes to work-life balance, especially with children or other care responsibilities at home. We purposefully operate our homes on a mixture of shift patterns to be able to accommodate staff needs for shifts that fit into their home life responsibilities.

Jason Downes

Executive Chairman

Alison Platt

Head of HR

Simon Moules

Responsible Individual

Steve

Registered Manager

Our Homes

Enlightery has two clusters of home, one in Surrey and one in Buckinghamshire/Slough. We aim to present our homes as normal family homes, with a high standard of decoration, quality furniture and always with sufficient outdoor garden space to allow our children and staff to enjoy so time outside of the home.