Foster care is about caring for a child or young person in your own home. Foster care provides the opportunity for children who are in need to live in a family home environment.

Some children may eventually return to their families. In some cases, this may be a matter of days or weeks. Others may take much longer. Some children go on to be adopted while some stay in foster care on a long-term or permanent basis.

Foster carers are trained and assessed to care for Looked After children. Foster carers work with fostered children and other relevant agencies to ensure children have a loving home environment, and high-quality care, to make them safe and give them the best possible outcomes.

After an initial visit and assessment of your home, you are provided with an Application Pack.  You need to complete this and return it to us.  Once received, we will commence the statutory checks and arrange a medical with your GP. You will be allocated an Assessing Social Worker, who will complete your assessment with you.  This will include enquiries into your background, character, health and overall family circumstances, plus your experiences and strengths as a potential carer.  

Once the Assessing Social Worker has completed their assessment, they prepare a report about you called a Form F.  This Form F is then presented to our fostering panel, consisting of representatives from health, education, foster care and other appropriately experienced people. They make recommendations to approve foster carers. 

We undertake checks on applicants and members of their households. These are some of the checks we do:

• Identity checks 
• Relationship status 
• References 
• Health checks 
• Enhanced DBS checks 
• Social Services check

As part of the assessment, you are required to attend Skills to Foster, a 2 day introductory course to fostering and social work. 

You need good health, an understanding of the difficulties faced by young people and their parents and a commitment to the welfare of children, which is shared and supported by all family members. 

You have a choice in who you undertake to care for. The fostering assessment will also help identify which young people you’d be best suited to. We will also give you the training to help you increase your skills and abilities.

Yes, you do. Your fostering assessment will identify your skills and abilities and the type of young person you’d be best equipped to care for; you are also involved in the matching of any child into your placement.

FosteringMatters will provide you with all the support and help you need to provide an excellent home environment for your foster child.

In addition to the initial skills to Foster training, FosteringMatters has a comprehensive training program that we expect you to commit to. This program is designed to help you develop your knowledge, skills, and confidence as a foster carer. Training is both face to face and online.

All our carers receive a generous fostering allowance. The level of the allowance varies depending on the needs of the child or young people you look after.

Although FosteringMatters do provide placements for babies they are generally within a parent and child referral, or within a sibling group referral. Local Authorities will not place children under 5 years old with anyone who smokes. We do receive a wide range of requests for young people, but the bulk of referrals we receive are for teenagers.
If you are interested in fostering a child of any age we would love to speak with you!

We are committed to Safeguarding and some serious convictions will bar anyone from fostering.

However, it is possible to foster with convictions, dependent upon what convictions you have, how long ago they occurred and even what they are and the age you were when you were convicted. Some foster carers who have experienced the criminal justice system first-hand can make excellent foster carers as they can relate to young people in similar situations and act as role models. Having that experience can often mean that a young person will listen to them and take their advice.

Foster care is a regulated activity and is exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. We will therefore ask you at a very early stage whether you have any past convictions and will undertake an Enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service, which is a criminal record check.

If you want to foster but worry that something in your past may prevent you, please do contact us and we can talk you through your options.

Yes. This is a key requirement. Foster children must have their own room although under certain circumstances siblings can share a room.

The legal age to become a foster carer is 18 years. However, at FosteringMatters our minimum age limit is 21 years.

There is not an official upper age limit, but it very much depends on your health, wellbeing and energy levels, previous caring/parenting experiences and the type of fostering you want to undertake.

Most definitely! Our team includes single foster carers and carers who have not parented their own children and who provide safe and loving homes to vulnerable children and young people. If in doubt, just call us and we’ll talk it through.

Yes! FosteringMatters has a zero tolerance to discrimination and has carers and staff which reflects the diverse nature of the UK, so we welcome applications from all.

We know that many people from these groups have experienced discrimination and so can bring vital insights into the needs of young people and the discrimination they may face.

This depends upon each child’s situation. Children who need permanent care will usually have plans agreed upon and protected by a Court Order. The decision will already have been made that a child cannot be cared for by their birth family. However, there is a requirement that carers support children to maintain contact with their birth family in some form unless there are clear reasons not to do so and this will be detailed in the Care Plan that each child has.

If the placement is short-term, there will probably be regular contact with the birth family. Your training will equip you to deal with situations involving contact with the child’s birth parents.

Parent and Child placements have many variations and are generally for experienced carers who have undertaken additional parent and child placement training. We provide extensive training and support.
As with all fostering, your home accommodation will need to be suitable to meet the needs of both the parent and the child.

Many people decide to foster when their own children have left home.
Our ‘empty nesters’ find fostering rewarding and a great challenge. They feel they are giving something back and making a huge difference in young people’s lives. As a parent of older children, you have years of parenting experience to bring to a fostering role.

We will also provide you with training in the areas you haven’t encountered before and you might even consider widening your fostering considerations.

The key issues we look at here are the type of fostering you are interested in, the age range you want to look after and your own personal health and lifestyle, so if you’re over 55 and want to foster we’d love to hear from you.