What is fostering?
Fostering is actually all about rebuilding a child’s or young persons’ Future who is unable to live with their parents.
Fostering is a way of providing a stable family life for children and young people who are unable to live with their parents or other relatives. Fostering is challenging but also rewarding at the same time. It takes time, patience and commitment to foster. The children and young people placed with foster carers are from a number of different cultural, religious and ethnic backgrounds and will display different behaviours depending upon their various experiences. All children and young people are different, making it difficult to define a typical child, however, what you can expect is that, as with any child or young person, they need security, stability and the chance to develop and thrive.
Why do some children need to live with other families?
Why do some children need to live with families other than their own and what does this mean for them? They come into care for a whole range of reasons, including family members illness, drug or alcohol misuse, domestic violence between parents or financial deprivation. Some children may have been abused or neglected. Foster care gives families a chance to sort out their problems by providing the child or children with a home and supporting the family for as long as they need.
Fostering offers children a safe and caring family while they are unable to live with their own. When a child is taken into care the local authority becomes responsible for their welfare. In the meantime, social workers work with families to make the home a safe place for a child. The ultimate aim is that the child and their parents can be reunited.
Who are Foster Carer and what is their role?
About 70 per cent of children in care in the UK live with foster carers. Foster carers usually specialise in caring for children of a particular age. Some will foster babies or very young children they move in with a friend or family member and other look after children between the age of 5-11 years or prefer to offer a home to teenagers.
Foster carers come from all backgrounds and bring a wide range of life and work experiences. They receive training and support to help them develop the skills to meet the needs of children in care while working alongside a team of professionals providing children with the highest standard of care.
Fostering is not easy; but it offers the opportunity to make a huge difference to the lives of the children who need it.
What is the difference between Fostering & Adoption?
Fostering differs from adoption. The main difference is that with adoption you become a child’s legal parent permanently, whilst fostering is usually temporary, until a child returns to their family. Children who cannot return home but still want to stay in touch with their families often live in long-term foster care and have continued support from their local authority or health and social care trust. Foster carers never have parental responsibility for a child that they care for.
Adoption means providing a new family for children who cannot be brought up by their own parents. Adopting a child is a legal procedure in which all the parental responsibility are transferred to the adopters. An adopted child loses all legal ties with their “birth parents” and becomes a full member of the new family.
Want to know if you can foster?
Find out if you meet the criteria to become one of our foster carers.
We are recruiting Foster Carers
We are currently recruiting foster carers across all the London Boroughs and the surrounding counties. Please go through the website and contact us to register an interest in fostering.
Foster in your area
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SSFA has a range Policies and Procedures concerning Social Work Practice, HR and Finance which are used to guide staff and for tendering and commissioning purposes. If any of the issues that are not covered please do contact your supervising social worker or our registered manager who will guide you to the appropriate policy. Shining Stars Fostering Agency Tri-X policies