New to fostercare?

• If you are new to the idea of fostering, please don’t just sit there pondering - give us a call!
• The decision to want to foster has to be yours and that of your family. You need to be in control of the process and of making that first step.
• Once you do take that step, we will be with you all the way on this exciting and rewarding journey.

Are you suitable?

To help you quickly establish whether you are likely to be a suitable applicant then please try the family matters quiz. It will help you decide on your eligibility and suitability.

What support will I get?

The availability, the quality, and the consistency of support that foster parents receive can and does have a direct bearing on how well they can do their job. This in turn, has a real impact on how well children and young people can settle and develop in their foster placements.

Family Fostering Partners was created because we know how important support is for foster parents and we wanted to provide our families with genuine partnership.

The support offered to our foster parents includes:

• At least fortnightly visits to your home by your personal Supervising Social Worker. If you require any additional support over and above fortnightly visits, this will be available to you.
• Access to a local out of hours service, staffed by people who will know you and your young person in placement, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
• Link Worker attendance to support you at all meetings, conferences and reviews
• Paid respite for carers who are looking after young people who have complex needs
• A guaranteed retainer for specialist Parent and Child carers
• Bi monthly carer support meetings
• A programme of regular training
• Participation in a 12 week fostering changes programme – a bespoke training course designed to deliver practical parenting support
• Birthday, Festival and Holiday allowances
• A programme of activities for carers and children, including birth children
• Free membership of Fostering Network

Learning and development

When you decide to foster, training is a compulsory element of your commitment to the role.

At Family Fostering Partners we aim to provide the opportunity for our foster parents not only to achieve the minimum necessary standards to become an effective foster parent, but also to provide them with the opportunity to obtain more specialist skills. Our range of training courses are delivered in an engaging and user-friendly manner, so if you are put off by the thought of learning and development – don’t be.

With knowledge comes confidence. Whilst the idea of fostering a vulnerable child may at first seem daunting, with the right training and support foster parents are amazed at what can be achieved. A large part of the fostering task is about learning – learning new skills, learning how and when to apply them and learning about the child. If you don’t have the willingness or a desire to learn then perhaps fostering is not for you.

The children and young people entrusted to us deserve the best care possible, and our objective is to ensure our carers are in the position to provide them with that care, whatever the individual needs of the child or young person.

Matching

For a foster placement to be successful, the initial matching process of a child/young person to the Family Fostering Partners foster home is critically important.

This matching process considers the child or young person’s age, their overall needs, their personal history, behaviour, interests and hobbies, talents and skills and cultural needs, and then matches these to the carers own family composition, interests and experience. By doing this, we give the placements the very best chance of working and of providing stability and emotional reward to the young person and to the foster parent.

Our aim is to recruit carers who themselves are robust and resilient in order to cope with the challenging and difficult behaviours sometimes exhibited by the children and young people for whom they will care. This work starts at the initial visit, and then continues through the rigorous assessment process undertaken by prospective Family Fostering Partners carers.

All of the agency’s carers – experienced and new to their role, receive regular training and up-skilling to ensure they are properly prepared to help manage challenging behaviour and to improving relationships with the children and young people they care for.

So that we can best meet the matching needs of our Local Authority customers, both in terms of geography and skill-sets required, we invest in an ongoing carer recruitment programme. This recruitment is driven by our understanding of the referral patterns and by our knowledge of the areas of greatest need communicated by our Local Authority customers.