What is fostering?

Being a foster carer means looking after someone else’s child for a period of time. Children come into foster care for many reasons, it may be due to family illness or because parents are experiencing problems. This might be with drugs or alcohol, or that they find it very difficult to cope with their children’s behaviour. Some children also come into foster care because they have been abused at home.

Children may be in foster care for anything from one night to several months. In some cases they remain in foster care on a long-term basis.

Foster carers help by caring for the child by working with social workers and others – school, health and sometimes directly with the child’s parents.

Because the needs of the children needing to be fostered is so varied, we need to have a range of different people to be foster carers. It will then be possible to place children in the best family for them.