Types of fostering
Emergency fostering:
When children need foster care for a few nights.
Short term fostering:
When foster carers look after children for a few weeks or months while plans are made for the child's future.
Short breaks fostering:
When disabled children with special needs or children with behavioural difficulties regularly stay for a short period of time with a family so that their parents or usual foster carers can have break.
Special needs fostering:
Children needing foster care include those with medical conditions or physical or learning disabilities, such as autism, hyperactivity, attention deficits, or reading difficulties.
Remand fostering:
When young people, teenagers are remanded by a court to the care of specially trained foster carer/carers.
Long term fostering:
Not all children who have to live permanently away from their birth family need to be adopted so instead they can go in to long term foster care.
Family and Friends/Kinship fostering:
A child who is the responsibility of the local authority goes to live with someone they already know, which usually means a family member, such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers or sisters.
Parent and child fostering:
Usually a mother and her child are placed with foster carers to keep the child and mother safe and often to provide a foster carer assessment of the mother's parenting skills.
Specialised Therapeutic fostering:
Foster care for children and young people with very complex needs and/or challenging behaviour.
Timescales
In our experience, Local Authorities take six months and Independent Fostering Agencies take an average of four months to complete the foster carer assessment. However Local Authorities are catching up.
More information...Foster care course
As your application proceeds you will be invited to attend a fostercare training course, most Fostering Agencies use the Fostering Network course called "Skills to Foster".
More information...Assessment
The fostering social worker will visit you and your family at home. It is important that you discuss fostering with your children at an early stage and check out how they feel about being part of a fostering family.
More information...
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