Editorial

A foster placement provides the stability and normality that is needed for children in care to develop and help them through difficult times in their lives. This means a range of different foster carers are needed to meet the needs of different children.

Whatever your age or personal circumstances you can become a foster carer. As long as you have the commitment and room in your home and room in your heart to look after a child, you can help make a huge difference to a child's life.

What is fostering?

Fostering provides homes for children for many different reasons, maybe because of a crisis in the child's family, abuse, alcohol or drug addictions or parents who are unable to cope.

As a Foster Carer, you will be able to decide the types of children best suited to you and your family. Brothers and sisters who need to stay together, children with special needs, teenagers, asylum seeking youngsters and mothers and their children all need foster homes.

Foster caring is a service where you will care for other people's children in your home;

Fostering can be challenging and stressful but it is often fun, can be enormously rewarding and you will get lots of help;

Fostering is looking after children for short periods, months, years and sometimes permanently.
Fostering is looking after children of all ages and from many different backgrounds.

Foster caring is a partnership which focuses on the needs of the child. Foster carers, parents and social workers all work together.

Click here to Register for more information or to apply to become a foster carer.

Fostercare research

A recently published research document produced by Professor Bob Broad of London South Bank University analyses the views and experiences of children and foster carers as part of a ten year longitudinal study.

Professor Broad says: ‘It is especially important that children in foster care feel valued within a safe, stable, loving family situation. Their health and well-being are connected to their participation in family life, and decisions about their foster placement’.

This research study evidences the high value children in foster care place on their current foster carer whilst also wanting further contact with their birth family. The study points to the positive yet often difficult journeys they make as they seek to sustain friendships, achieve a good education, and in some cases, improve their mental health and behaviour.

Foster care news is a response to the shortfall of foster carers. It is a unique, not for profit web based service designed by fostering social workers to encourage interested people to apply to become foster carers who might feel confused and/or uncertain about their suitability or which Agency to contact.

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