What is Fostering?

This may because a child’s family is experiencing some difficulties due to illness or family breakdown, or because there are concerns about a child’s safety and wellbeing at home. Where adoption is a legal process by which parental responsibility for a child is permanently transferred from birth parents to adoptive parents, fostering is different. Foster carers always share the responsibility for looking after a child with social services, and do not become the child's parent legally. Fostering can be a temporary way of looking after a child until he or she can return to a birth family, or it can be a permanent arrangement.

We have foster carers who offer a range of placements:

• Long term - this is for children who cannot return to their birth parents, but for whom adoption is not thought to be in their best interests. Children placed for long term fostering are often older, or have contact with their birth family.
• Short term - this is for children who need looking after temporarily, perhaps at times of crisis and stress in the birth family. This may be for a period of weeks or sometimes months.
• Bridging - our foster carers work with children to prepare them for moving on, perhaps to adoption, independence, or back home.
• Respite care - a support resource for parents or other foster carers of children with special needs.
• Mother and baby - a special support where foster carers offer a supportive home to both mother and her child to help to nurture the bonding or simply to provide a supportive short term and safe environment.