What is Fostering
Fostering is a way of providing family life for someone else’s child in your own home when they are unable to live with their birth family.
When understanding what is foster care, it's important to realise that foster care placements can be short term or long term, and can last for days, months or years. Many children return home to their birth families, but others may receive long term support, either through continued fostering, adoption, residential care, or by being helped to live independently.
Foster carers play a vital role in providing a safe, secure and stable fostering environment for looked after children and young people – encouraging positive and bright futures.
Fostering with an Independent Fostering Agency (IFA)
Independent Fostering Agencies (IFA's), like FCA, work in partnership with Local Authorities to place looked after children and young people into fostering families registered to them. FCA provides the infrastructure to deliver an extended range of therapeutic support services to our foster carers, which produces some outstanding outcomes.
What is the difference between fostering and adoption?
To understand what is foster care, it's important to understand that fostering and adoption differ, in the way that an adoption order ends a child’s legal relationship with their natural family, whereas looked after children remain the legal responsibility of the Local Authority and/or their birth parents in fostering.
Foster care placements can be long term in duration, but the legal responsibility of the looked after child or young person still remains with the Local Authority and/or their birth family.
Content © Foster Care Associates 2010