Support for children
in foster care

Our number one priority, always, is on children and young people – on meeting their needs, keeping them happy and safe, and giving them the relationships they need to grow and thrive. We’ve put a lot of thought and effort into achieving this goal.

Children in our care can always rely on:

• Safe and secure family homes - the relationships children have with their foster parents is critical to their long-term development, so we take great care to recruit, train, develop and support high-quality people who share our commitment and passion.
• A careful plan for each child - we listen to every child and build a plan around their needs and long-term ambitions. We call this a ‘pathway’ and it’s like a map, with key stepping-stones along the journey. Together with our foster parents, we’re responsible for helping each child take positive steps along this pathway.
• Regular meetings with social workers - a dedicated social worker will spend time every month with each child in our care, listening to their experiences, recording their achievements and monitoring and measuring progress against their plan. This 3-way relationship – children in care, social workers and foster parents - means that everyone’s working closely together towards the same objective. Our supervising social workers are highly qualified, trained and experienced in working with young people.
• Educational specialists - clearly, education is a major element of any child’s development and it’s important we get this aspect right – especially as many children in care will have had disrupted experiences. We have access to a pool of educational specialists who are there to find the right schools and support, and even to form clear and individual learning plans where needed. Working with children and their foster parents, we help each child reach their potential.
• Professional therapists - some of the children and young people in our care might need additional support from qualified counsellors and therapists. If so, we make it available to children and foster parents, providing the specialist back-up needed to keep each child’s development on track.
• Regular meetings and activities - all of our offices arrange regular events to bring children and their foster families together. Varying from a simple get together through to trips out to theme parks, pantomimes or the seaside, they encourage foster families to form valuable friendships and an informal support network.

With all of these things and the close loving support of our foster parents, we provide children with stable, loving homes, while also encouraging them to express their ideas and reach their full potential.