Fostering is looking after someone else’s child in your home. It’s different from adoption where the adoptive parent becomes the legal parent of the child.
Our objective is to support foster parents to enable children and young people to fulfil their full potential.
Children are referred to us by different local authorities. Our experienced social work team match up the different needs of these children and young people with the various skills and abilities of different foster parents.
Children could be very young, school age or older teenagers. Sometimes they need a family able to look after them and their siblings.
Children in the care of a local authority come to live with Foster Parents, also called Foster Carers. This is referred to as a placement for the child. No two children are the same but typically they have had a difficult start to their lives and may have experienced trauma, neglect and abuse.
Welsh Government’s programme to eliminate profit making from the care of looked after children aims to stop private companies from making money from fostering. They are supporting charities like SFS to carry on providing the services we do.
All children are different. While many children in care have had unfortunate early life experiences at the end of the day children are children and deserve a safe, secure, loving family.
Some foster parents look after one child, some are able to provide a home to two or more children, some are able to care for siblings to keep them living together.
The length of time children live with foster parents varies enormously. Some might be an emergency for a couple of nights, others stay for many years where the placement is planned very carefully.
Each foster family is different, some are able to offer long term placements, others prefer a shorter term commitment. Our job is to very carefully match the different skills and experiences of foster parents with the different needs of children and young people. The better the match the greater the chances of the placement working really well.
For more details about the types of foster care click here. (existing page/info)