Our training ethos

• Family Fostering Partners is an attachment-focused agency because we believe that positive, meaningful relationships are crucial to overall health and wellbeing.
• We believe that nurture, love and support are the best ways to support physical and mental development.
• All of our training programmes are focused on the principles of therapeutic care as this provides children with the best possible futures.

When a baby is born, nearly all of the cells in the human brain – about 100 billion of them – are already in place but are not yet working. Adults need to be on hand to help their infants “wire up” these connections by offering kind, consistent and sensitive care. Attachment describes the way in which adult care givers help children feel loved, and how the strong foundation this creates helps their brain develop and supports all their future development.

Abuse, neglect or rejection all have serious implications for healthy brain development, but foster parents are in the unique position of being about to provide children with the secure base that they may have been missing. Therapeutic care can repair some of the harm that children have experienced, and it is this kind of care that we aim to provide at Family Fostering Partners.

Our goal is to build positive safe and stable relationships between children and their foster parents and to create successful foster care for everyone.

As a foster parent, you will hold the privileged position of caring for a child who is unable to live with their birth parents. The children who come into foster care can be of all ages and from many different backgrounds with a variety of reasons for needing to be looked after. Sometimes it is because of a family illness; relationship problems; family breakdown, or a situation where their safety and wellbeing is threatened. Most children will have experienced neglect or perhaps physical, emotional or sexual abuse and will have faced more difficult situations and hard times than most adults ever will.

These difficult experiences can make it incredibly hard for children to build trusting relationships with adults, to feel a sense of family membership and belonging, and to understand and manage their own feelings and emotions. This can lead to low self-esteem, a lack of confidence and behavioural problems.

At the heart of our carer training ethos is helping you to build positive relationships with the children that you care for. By doing this, you will be helping children to repair attachments, to develop more secure and healthy relationships, and to feel a sense of family belonging. Research tells us this will help the children we care for to develop self-confidence, self-esteem and self-reliance and contribute to a strong sense of identity and belonging. With these foundations in place, children and young people are afforded the best chance to secure positive long-term outcomes in education, health and overall wellbeing.