What Is Foster Care, Fostering, Family Placement?

When a child’s birth family home becomes an unsuitable place to live this can mean one or more of many things:

• The child could have been abused in some way or may be in danger of becoming abused.
• The child may have been, abused, neglected or emotionally hurt.
• The child’s parents or carers may not be able to care anymore.
• The child needs to live somewhere safe and caring that will help the child to grow and develop.

Current Social Work practice, underpinned by the legal framework of the Children Act, believes that foster care is almost always the first choice for children who cannot live at home. If we at Five Rivers are to undertake this work then we need to recruit and train suitable families who are likely to be able to provide distressed children and teenagers with a home and good care.

The young people with whom we work also need something else, which can sometimes conflict with their carer’s view of what is good for them. They need their own families. Contact and how that is managed and arranged is one of the most important areas of foster care work. It is also likely to be the most difficult. These children may have been abused, neglected and hurt but they still need to have a relationship with their birth families.

That relationship may be quite close and difficult and frustrating to work with, or it might be less intense and the work for the foster carer will be to help the child to understand his or her family origins, and to come to terms with what has happened.

As a foster family or foster carer you can expect a great deal of very hard work:

• First of all you will need to have a spare room.
• You will need to be trained so you will be asked to go on a course. This is usually a Residential course, which takes place over a long weekend.
• You also need to have a full assessment made of you and your family so that Five Rivers and the responsible authority for the child are satisfied that you are right both for the job and for the particular child who may have been identified for you.

Five Rivers works in a way that keeps the child’s needs as a priority all the way through our work so that once you have been trained and your assessment is ready, we will only place a child with you if we feel that you are right for that specific child. Once a child has been placed with you, you can expect to be surprised, if you have never fostered before. Although you thought that you had understood everything you learned about in the training, the reality of being a foster carer is very different from the theory!

However, there are other things that you can expect from us!:

• You will get a support group with other carers who are great to talk to and share problems with.
• You receive regular and high quality training.
• You receive regular support and supervision from a experienced and qualified social worker who is designated to you who will visit you every three weeks when needed.
• You will have access to our 24 hour support and guidance, there’s always someone to talk to!
• You and the child may receive what is known as ‘respite care’ - another carer will take the child or young person for short periods of time to provide you with a break and the child with some breathing space. This means that you can go away for a weekend together with your own family or just relax at home for a couple of days, safe in the knowledge that your foster child is being well looked after.

Families Take Many Different Forms!

We welcome enquiries from two parent households, single people, childless people and people of any ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation and disability.

If you feel you can provide the quality of care, safety and commitment that the children need we would be pleased to talk to you.

For further information please complete our online enquiry and we will contact to discuss fostering in further detail.