More power to foster carers

At the age of six, Kirby was put into foster care after her mother died. Although from a black African background, Kirby was placed with two white foster parents, but she says this had no bearing on how welcome her carers made her feel.

“The family really took me in,” she recalls. “They never made me feel any different. They literally treated me like I was one of their kids – they had three of their own, all older than me. Even their children called me their sister.”

Apart from a brief, unsuccessful period with another foster carer, Kirby stayed with this foster family until she was 12. After that, she was cared for by her aunt. Looking back on what was a difficult period following the death of her mother, Kirby, now 22, feels immense gratitude to her foster family for the support they gave her.

“After my Mum died, I was a typical temper tantrum child,” she says. “A lot of foster carers might have thought, ‘this is too much’, but they stuck it out with me. I feel very grateful to them.”

Stories such as Kirby’s are illustrative of the transformative role foster carers play in providing stability to thousands of vulnerable children and young people in the UK. According to campaigning charity the Fostering Network, around 59,000 children live with 45,000 foster families across the UK – representing around 80 per cent of the total number of children in care in the UK.

However, there are not enough carers to meet the volume of children coming into the care system. The Fostering Network estimates that in 2012, 8,750 new foster families must be recruited to keep up with demand. This is partly due to the sharp increase in the number of children entering care since the Baby Peter tragedy in Haringey came to light in late 2008. The current turnover of foster carers is exacerbating the situation, with 14 per cent retiring or leaving the workforce each year.

“There is always a shortage of foster carers. More children have been coming into care in the past year, but I’m not sure there’s been a similar increase in foster carers being recruited,” says Elaine Dibben, foster care consultant at the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF).

Further pressure comes from the need to find the right kind of carers to take on the children coming into the system. Sibling groups, for example, can be difficult to place because of the extra space they require. Older children are also harder to place, partly because foster carers often want to look after younger children, but also because of the impact of the Baby Peter case. “Since Baby P, lots more younger children have come into the care system, and lots of foster carers who have normally looked after teenagers are being asked to look after younger children,” says Jackie Sanders, head of campaigns at the Fostering Network.

The North West of England is a region that has faced particularly severe pressures on its fostering service. In 2009, the North West faced a shortfall of up to 2,000 carers, the highest deficit outside of London. The situation prompted the region’s 23 local authorities to collaborate on an advertising campaign to raise awareness of fostering and encourage more carers to come forward.

The campaign aimed to recruit 150 carers over and above the numbers already coming forward and to find more carers for the groups of children that were traditionally under-represented in the fostering system. Rachael Suthurst at Rochdale Council, one of the project leads in the campaign, explains: “People tended to want to foster babies – what we were trying to do with the campaign was to show we need them for other ages too”.

The campaign has elicited more than 3,000 enquiries, leading to 120 confirmed approvals with around 70 still in the system. Although the campaign is still running, Suthurst says it has “definitely met its target”.

Retaining carers
But while recruiting sufficient new carers to meet demand is an ongoing pressure, equally important is the need to retain existing foster carers. “I don’t think it’s really hard to recruit 14 per cent of the workforce every year, so in that sense there is no crisis. But actually what we should be able to do is stop 14 per cent of the workforce leaving every year,” says the Fostering Network’s Sanders.

She says the government must address a number of issues that are driving carers out of active service prematurely. These include pay; the support available for carers when they run into difficulties with children in their charge; delegated authority, which is the ability of foster carers to make day-to-day decisions for children; and status – a recognition that foster carers have an equal standing to other childcare professionals. “All these areas need to improve to ensure that no foster carer leaves the field before they are ready. Improving these areas also helps with recruitment, as it means that fostering is more attractive to a wider range of people,” says Sanders.

In addition, Sanders says local authorities need to gain a better understanding of the children who are coming into care and their specific needs, which would enable them to recruit carers with the right skills. She says there is also a strong case for using the existing workforce more effectively. “There are currently foster carers working for independent fostering providers who have not had a placement for months, while some local authorities are desperate for more homes. We would like to see better and more strategic relationships between local authorities and independent fostering providers, allowing better use of the workforce,” she says.

Many of the issues Sanders highlights are the subject of discussions taking place within the Department for Education ahead of the publication this summer of a children in care strategy. The government has given prominent focus to driving up adoption numbers with the publication in March of an adoption action plan but it is now turning its attention to other aspects of care, including fostering.

The DfE has convened five working groups of foster care professionals and experts to investigate the pressing issues (see box). “We want to get a better understanding of what parts of the system are working well – and what needs to improve,” says a DfE spokesman.

“It’s clear there are some real issues emerging around recruitment and retention; raising the skill level of foster carers; looking at how allegations [against carers] are managed and how we can strengthen investigations to make sure that they happen quickly and foster carers are fully supported through the process; speeding up assessment and approval of foster carers; and using all the levers we have to make sure that foster carers can exercise full parental responsibility and authority for children in their care.”

Kevin Williams, chief executive of fostering and adoption charity Tact, hopes the strategy will provide some much-needed recognition of the importance of foster care at a time when he believes it has been overshadowed by the political attention paid to adoption.

“The messages that came out with the adoption plan were challenging and critical of the care system, with references to children ‘languishing in care’,” Williams says. “The connotation of that is that foster carers are not doing their job properly, when our research tells us that the most important person in the lives of children in long-term care is the foster carer. If this strategy is to work, giving out those positive messages is going to be really important; for many children, foster care has transformed their lives.”

Family group
Like Kirby, 21-year-old Jess is a testament to the immeasurable value of good foster care. At the age of 14, she and her siblings were placed in foster care and moved from their hometown of Swansea in Wales, to Radstock in Somerset. The move was necessary because they had asked to be moved as a family group, and this was the only placement available to them.

As a result of her move, Jess says she went from being a school dropout – a result of having to look after her younger sister – to attaining eight GCSEs, A-levels and a nursing qualification. She puts her progress down to the stability provided by her foster parents.

“They didn’t even mention foster care or anything,” she says. “And they didn’t try to shut my other parents out, they said, ‘yes, they’re still your parents, we’d like you still to be in contact with them’. I couldn’t have asked for better.”

Jess acknowledges that she did not always make life easy for her foster parents, but that this was a result of her disrupted childhood. Although she would like to see more people come forward as foster carers, she stresses that they need to be prepared for the fact that, like her, children coming into their care are likely to be from damaged backgrounds.

Indeed, BAAF’s Elaine Dibben says this is the central message that the government and local authorities need to disseminate about fostering as they try to find new carers to come forward: that it is not easy, but can be hugely beneficial to all involved. “There must be people out there we’re not reaching with the right message who may be put off by myths we haven’t managed to dispel yet,” she says. “Fostering is challenging, it is difficult, but it’s also incredibly rewarding.”