The Children

Before you apply it is worth knowing who you would be caring for. This is the short version — why children come into care, how they behave and why, and what that asks of a household. The detail comes later, during the assessment.

Why children come into care

No social worker can remove a child from home without the parents’ agreement unless there is reason to believe the child is at significant risk of harm — neglect, or physical, emotional or sexual abuse. That decision is never one person’s. Education, health and other professionals are consulted, and a manager signs it off.

Some children come into foster care because their own family asks for it, where they feel they cannot meet the child’s needs. Social workers have to offer support to the family before agreeing to that.

Others are moved because of risk outside the home — a young person being exploited or targeted by a gang, where it is safer for them to be somewhere else for a while. The police are involved in those.

Every child has their own social worker, who assesses what the child needs with input from the parents, health and education.

They and their manager take a view on whether the child could safely go home, and what would have to change for that. A child might need a home for one night, or for years. If going home is ruled out, the child may stay in foster care, or be adopted.

Who they are

Children come into foster care at any age from birth to seventeen. In practice Sparks carers are rarely asked to care for very young children — there is no shortage of homes for them, and most either return to family or are adopted. Where we are asked, it is usually a sibling group, or a child with additional needs.

Older children are not automatically harder work than younger ones. What matters is the trauma a child has been through and how they are coping with it. A toddler may have tantrums, soil the floor and not sleep. A teenager may shout, slam doors and go missing. Plenty of children in care do neither and are settled.

We also look hard at the children already in your home before any match — their ages, and the risk in both directions. A teenage girl would be very unlikely to be placed with a family who have a boy of a similar age, or the other way round.

Children in care come from every ethnicity and religion. We would prefer to match a child with a household that shares their background, but there are not enough carers from minority and religious communities for that to be possible most of the time.

So every applicant is asked whether they are open to caring for a child of a different ethnicity or religion, and we expect the answer to be yes. Where someone says no, we explore why. Intolerant or discriminatory views mean an application will not go forward.

Where we cannot match on background, you are expected to do your best by the child’s identity, and we support that with information, training and links to community organisations.

Homes are needed for boys, girls, and occasionally children who identify as another gender. Children may also be working out their sexuality.

A child’s gender or sexual identity does not by itself tell us what they need. Where it does raise needs, we match accordingly and make sure the household is trained and supported. A child may also come to identify differently while living with you — which happens in any family. No child should feel less welcome in their home because of it.

Some children need help to build their English — often unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, but also young children, children who have been neglected, and children with learning difficulties.

You are not expected to arrive knowing how. You are expected to be willing to learn.

How they behave, and why

Imagine someone arrived at your door now, gave you minutes to pack, and took you to live with a family in another country who spoke a different language. Imagine contact with everyone you know stopped, or was supervised. Most adults would not be at their best. It is not exactly what a child in care goes through, but it is close enough — and every child in care is carrying grief and loss.

Some children turn it outwards — swearing, slamming doors, going missing. Some turn it inwards — not talking, staying in their room.

Others are relieved to be away from home and settle quickly and happily. Some of those children struggle later instead, as they get older and start working out who they are.

New carers are not matched with children known to present particularly challenging behaviour. That work goes to specialist carers with additional training, which can include restraint training.

Every carer gets training on supporting behaviour, and our Behaviour Support policy is there to be returned to, not read once.

Children in care do less well at school than their peers, and the reasons are not mysterious. Every one of them has moved home and been separated from people who mattered. Trauma makes concentration hard. Being in care means meetings, questions, and feeling different.

What is asked of you is partly the ordinary — going to school meetings, backing the teachers, helping with homework — and partly more than that: finding what a child is good at outside the classroom, and building them up enough to focus inside it.

Their family is still their family

This is the part applicants most often have not thought about. Most children in foster care go on seeing their parents and brothers and sisters — it is called family time. It can be by phone or message, or face to face at a contact centre with staff present, or unsupervised where a child is working towards going home.

Most carers have no direct contact with a child’s family, and you are never under any obligation to. If you did want to, it would need the agreement and oversight of both social workers, and everything would be recorded.

Family time can go well, and it can sit alongside a plan for a child to go home. Many children find it distressing all the same — because they miss their family, because it reminds them of what happened, or because of something said while they were there.

Sometimes a parent says something damaging. Sometimes a parent encourages a child to behave in a way that would end the fostering arrangement. And the hardest of all is when a parent simply does not turn up.

Family time is occasionally stopped altogether — for instance where a parent is believed to have sexually abused the child, or where contact would affect a police investigation.

How long, and what it asks of you

Moves are often sudden — sometimes decided the same day, and often with little known about the child. At the point a child arrives, nobody can usually tell you whether they will stay days, months or years. Sparks carers are asked to be open to any length of stay, because the alternative is moving a child again, and every extra move costs them.

The best ending is a child going back to family, or to friends or relatives assessed as able to care for them. Some very young children are adopted.

Some move to a home their social worker thinks is a better fit, and we would want that planned, with time to meet the new carers first.

Sometimes a child moves because they have not settled. If you are finding it hard, tell your social worker straight away rather than waiting — the point is to work it through, because stability is what helps a child most.

The nearest comparison is a child staying with extended family. You give them a home, make sure they are in school, and meet the ordinary daily needs — while caring for them in a way that works for whoever holds parental responsibility.

There are more meetings than in most families: planning meetings, family time, education, health, clubs. It takes more time and attention than parenting usually does, because these children have lost more and need more to heal. That is why the assessment is as thorough as it is.

You record the child’s life in your home — routines, what they did, how they seemed. Daily at first, and whenever a child is unsettled; less often once things have settled, by agreement, to a minimum of monthly.

It matters for three reasons. Professionals can see how the child is being supported. If an allegation is ever made against you, your records are what you have. And many care-experienced adults have almost no record of their own childhood — what you write may be the only account a child has of those years.

You could be welcoming a child to your home soon

Apply to Foster Now

Or call 07920 097 834  ·  [email protected]