The benefits of a foster home

There are many reasons why children require a foster home. This may be a short-term arrangement or it may be required for a long-term basis because a child can no longer live with their own family. Foster children may have experienced some trauma and therefore may initially present with an array of emotions as a result of no longer living in their family home.

By welcoming a child into your family, they are offered sanctuary, a home where they can feel safe and supported. Over time you will be able to offer them the encouragement they need to build new trusting relationships in their life and offer individualised support in order to help them overcome their challenges so that they are able to see a new future for themselves.

• Stable and secure environment
• Academic stability
• Experience a happy family life
• Family contact

We carefully match the expertise and skill set of foster carers and their family life to the needs of the children requiring a foster home. We consider the matching of a child to a foster family an extremely important part of the fostering process.

For a child who has already suffered considerable loss, it is very important that the right family is chosen as his/her foster family to enable the child to experience a stable family life.

We invest in our training and development programme to enable our foster carers to be highly skilled in the supporting of children by understanding the reasons for certain behaviours and displays of emotion. This experience and knowledge is a factor when considering a new placement of a child with them.

The continued education of a child is a vital piece of their ability to recover from the separation from their family and their achievement of their true potential. A fostered child may need to change schools and it is vital that foster carers understand the significance of that on the child. We support our foster carers to maintain stability in a child’s education and we encourage our foster carers to play a big role in supporting other professionals involved in the child’s care plan so that the child reaches their educational milestones.

We believe that all looked after children should have the same life chances as every other child and when leaving care should feel equipped to lead their lives successfully. We feel that everyone in our team has the ability to influence the outcomes for a child by building meaningful and trusting relationships. We believe that the wishes of the child should be taken in to consideration when planning their future, so that they feel involved in decisions affecting their future lives. We feel that this enables trust to form in relationships and encourages the child to feel secure and safe.