- The knowledge that we are available and committed to supporting our foster carers at all times.
- The level of confidence felt by our carers as a result of their knowledge and skills, built as a result of the development we provide, especially in the subject of trauma informed care.
- The ability of foster carers to enable a child in their care to reach their true potential thanks to their combined experience, knowledge and support, as well their own resilience levels.
- The warm personal relationship our foster carers have with their supervising social worker and the support team around them.
- Their trust in our ability to work in partnership with our carers and work closely together to achieve the best we can for the children in their care.
- Their ability to participate in the organisational decision making, influencing what affects them and their role.
- Their feeling that their commitment, expertise and dedication to improve the lives of the children in their care is valued and respected by everyone in our agency.
- Their opportunity to contribute to how our organisation improves our service and thus their experience of fostering.
- Their joining with us to embrace the “To the Moon and Back” ethos, culture and values.
We take the wellbeing of everyone in our team very seriously. Our support team are chosen for their ability to build warm relationships and provide the skill and expertise needed to support our foster carers well. We enable our support team to make decisions and communicate with our foster carers effectively. We monitor and control our individual caseloads to ensure our support team are available to foster carers and we provide our team with their own support to ensure their wellbeing is also protected, ensuring that they are the best version of themselves.
We work to create a close supportive community around our foster carers, ensuring that they have access to support, from fostering peer mentors and key experts that will be able to sign post them to help and support when they need it. This is important to prevent potential feelings of isolation and to enable carers to build a network of reliable people who can offer practical help as well as someone to talk to at times of challenge.
Our ability to protect the wellbeing of our foster carers and their building of resilience, whilst they care for some of the most vulnerable children in our society, is vital to our reputation as an outstanding fostering agency. Our organisation is built on a foundation that sustains a culture of everyone feeling empowered and enabled. Each policy, process and system reflects our aims, beliefs and values, in our quest to attract and retain the most talented and caring people to build a positive future for children.
We embrace key theories that support holistic approaches to supporting people achieve their true potential. Our foster carers can expect to be treated as individuals. Our supervising social workers will work in close partnership with their family and external team, supported by our ethos, systems and processes to develop a meaningful support package to help carers succeed and meet the needs of the child in their care and help them to achieve their personal objectives too. The significance of feeling part of a respected but caring relationship is very important. We earn the trust of our foster carers, reflecting and focusing on what we can do to improve our service to our families, making good relationships with the larger team around the child too, so that we can ensure we are all focused on the child, supporting the foster carers to achieve everything possible.
