What is fostering?
Foster Care is a safeguarding system put in place in order to provide safe, stable family homes for vulnerable young people.
When a young person under the age of 18 can no longer live with their birth parents, for a variety of reasons, they are placed within the foster care system which provides temporary to long term care in a family environment, under the care of dedicated Foster Parents.
Young people come into care through the local authority who then place the child with either their own Foster Parents, or with a dedicated fostering service, such as those that UC2F have partnerships with across the UK. Even though local authorities have their own team of Foster Parents, they rely on independent fostering providers to offer additional support, not only to the Foster Parents, but with placements where a young person has additional needs, such as a therapeutic assessment or parenting assessment for a young parent and baby.
All fostering services that UC2F partner with take great pride in recruiting and training high-quality Foster Parents and matching them with the young people who come into care to get the best out of each foster placement for both the young people in their care and there approved Foster Parents.
What is a Foster Parent?
A Foster Parent is a self-employed person/s who looks after young people under the age of 18, whilst they can no longer live with their birth parents.
Foster Parents take the roles and responsibilities of a professional parent in order to provide the young person with a safe family home with care, support, security and compassion.
They must be willing to open up their home to vulnerable young people and provide them with the best care in order for them to grow and thrive. Foster Parents are required to be responsible for the young person’s needs and welfare providing a home, education, hobbies, sports, clothing, healthcare, as well as providing love, understanding, support, and guidance.
Foster Parents don’t work alone, they are required to work in a team, amongst professionals involved in the welfare of the young person, and are given training, fully comprehensive support and ongoing guidance and mentoring
Why become a Foster Parent?
There are thousands of children across the UK that have been treated poorly and abused or are simply no longer able to live with their own families.
These children and young people need foster care. By fostering a child in your local area, you can help a young person find safety and stability in their lives after having to leave their family home.
These children and young people all have incredible potential and are often in full-time education – but they need the support of caring foster parents to help them be everything they can be.
Foster parents often say that becoming a foster parent has been the best experience of their life and have lots of happy and inspiring fostering stories to share.
How to become a Foster Parent?
We know however, that despite wanting to be a foster parent, many people don’t have the information they need and are put off by what they believe to be a long and complex fostering assessment process.
That is why UC2F is here, we partner with a number of Therapeutic Fostering Services across the UK, who will make your fostering enquiry as easy as possible. We aim to provide prospective foster parents with all the information and education they need to become a foster parent and change the lives of a child or young person.
Each Therapeutic Fostering service we partner have their own support team, including social workers, who will help guide you through the process to becoming a Foster Parent – from your first home visit and your Assessment, all the way up until you meet with their Fostering Panel and officially become a foster parent.
