What is meant by the term Stability in relation to Foster care? This relates directly to the degree of stability a particular placement has. When matching, it is crucial that there are a range of options and choices because identifying the best matched placement for a child or young person, is key to achieving stability. Effective assessment and planning are essential pre-requisites for identifying the right placement. The importance of paying close attention to the wishes and opinions of carers, children and their families cannot be overestimated. This means that listening is fundamental to making good matches that result in stable placements. Adoption offers a minority of children permanence and stability. Children going forward for adoption are mostly aged between one and five years.

Other areas that relate to foster care and placement stability.

• When, for whatever reason, children are unable to return to their birth parents, ‘Kinship Care’ is an alternative option that can promote a greater chance of permanence. Generally the outcomes for children placed under these arrangements are good. Recent research has found that children in ‘Kinship Care’ “fare significantly better than those looked after in non-kinship foster care”. This despite there being some evidence suggesting kinship Foster Carers often receive less support than carers that are unrelated to the child or young person.
• Stability depends upon foster carers receiving the right levels of support to deal with the challenge of coping with children who can have behavioural and emotional problems. The provision of ongoing support should be geared very much for helping manage challenging behaviour. This is key to creating permanence and stability.
• Permanence and stability within the ‘looked after’ system can be offered by long-term foster care.
• The majority of children and young people who enter the care system do return home within a year. Effective case management, together with a proactive attitude when working with birth families are essential to achieving successful reunifications.

Considering becoming a foster carer?

That’s good news! we shall be pleased to chat with you whatever your status, level of education, background or religious faith. Our experienced staff are committed to giving advice that is always realistic, professional and tailored to your personal situation. The training we provide is always up to date, stimulating and conducted in a friendly relaxed fashion.

Your life experience.

It may not be immediately obvious, but your life experiences could well be relevant to a career in fostering. Our experience over the years, has shown us that there are certain qualities foster carers need to have. The ability to be flexible is important. It is also important to have a sense of humour, to be patient, to be encouraging and enthusiastic about wanting to make a real difference to a child or young person’s life.

The kind of people who become foster carers.

At Rainbow we search hard for potential foster carers from widely different backgrounds. People might be married or living together, they may have children or be childless, they might be single, divorced or same-sex couples. It is important that we can find placements for children with carers from their own background and culture. This is why we work very hard to attract foster carers from all ethnicities and religions.

Interested in taking things further?

You are on the blog section of our website. Thank you for visiting us! Please remember from here you can visit other parts of the website where there is masses of information about becoming a foster carer and what is involved. Please feel free to call us at any time to get a feel for what it might be to join our Rainbow community of foster carers. 020 8427 3355 is the number that might change your life as well as the life of a vulnerable child you are yet to meet.

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