Foster Care Facts

Foster Care Fortnight is a UK-wide awareness raising campaign, co-ordinated by charity the Fostering Network. This year, under the strapline fostering: recognise the qualities you’ve got, the campaign encourages people to realise that they may already share the same qualities as those currently fostering, and that these are the basis for becoming a great foster carer.

During the two-week campaign, fostering services around the UK will hold events to make people think about fostering and highlight the urgent need for more foster carers. The events are often imaginative, innovative and fun and have previously included the burial of time capsules, balloon launches, tree planting, floats in local parades, face painting and coffee mornings. The one thing the events always have in common is the opportunity for people to meet existing foster carers and find out more about fostering in their area.

For a selection of events and contact details for fostering services, see www.couldyoufoster.org.uk/services/

Fostering is a way of offering children and young people a home while their own parents are unable to look after them. This is often a temporary arrangement, and many fostered children return to their own families. Children who cannot return home but still want to stay in touch with their families often live with a long-term foster carer.

Adoption, on the other hand, is where a new family is provided for children who can no longer live with their own family. An adoption order transfers the child's legal relationship from their birth family to the new adoptive family.

Adoption is the best option for a minority of children, with around 4,000 children needing adoptive families. However, the vast majority of children in care do not need a new family, but rather to be given the highest standard of care until they can return to their own family or move on elsewhere.

Emergency fostering provides children with a place to go immediately, no matter what hour of the day or night, when social workers feel it is essential to remove the child from a particular situation. Longer-term plans will be considered for the child during the next working day, or they will return home as soon as the crisis is over.

Short break/respite fostering can help keep families together by giving them a much-needed breathing space. Foster carers look after a child maybe one weekend a month or for the occasional week during school holidays.

Short-term fostering allows foster carers to look after a child for a few weeks or months. There may be problems or illness in the family or the child may have been harmed or abused in some way. The aim of most short-term care is to get the child home to their own family as soon as possible.

Long-term fostering allows a child to grow up in a safe and supportive environment when they cannot return to live at home, while keeping in touch with their family if this is appropriate.

Foster carers look after children so that families have a chance to sort out their problems. These can range from a family member’s short-term illness to a parent’s depression or drug or alcohol abuse. Some children may have been abused or neglected. Social workers work with families to help them sort out problems and make the home a safe place for a child – with the aim that children and parents can be reunited.

Across the UK, over 50,000 children and young people live with 43,000 foster families on any one day. Many more move in and out of foster carers’ homes during the year.

In order to provide these children with the highest standard of care, each child should be able to live with a foster carer carefully chosen to meet their specific needs. The Fostering Network estimates that there is an urgent need for over 10,000 more foster carers in the UK. This shortage means that children are too often being moved from home to home, are split up from their brothers and sisters, and have to live a long way from their family and friends. The more people who are approved as foster carers, the more likely it is that a good match can be found for a child in terms of location, culture, lifestyle, language and interests, reducing this damaging instability and disruption.

A wider pool of foster carers right across the UK is needed to keep these children within their local area wherever possible. We urgently need more people to become foster carers. Foster Care Fortnight is the ideal time to find out more about fostering.

Almost anyone can apply to be a foster carer, but as with any career, some people will be more suited to it than others. Foster carers must be able to offer the time, commitment, space and skills to care for children separated from their own families. Key qualities include being a great listener, having a good sense of humour, being optimistic, having your feet firmly on the ground and showing resilience.

In practical terms, there are no age limits, up or down, and single people can foster as well as married or cohabiting couples. Some foster carers have their own children, others don’t. It doesn’t matter if foster carers own or rent a house. People of all ethnic origins are needed - children benefit from living with families who share their own culture, language and religion.

Foster carers are approved to look after a specified number, age and gender of children. Some people prefer working with older children and teenagers, while others are more skilled at looking after babies and toddlers.