Privacy

Fostering is definitely not a career to get into if you're a private person. The assessment process is long and intrusive, asking every detail about your life - including very personal matters such as past partners, health issues, IVF journey or miscarriages, reactions to traumatic events or bereavements, finances including any debts or bankruptcy, and if you're in a couple they will even cover your sex life. These are not matters anyone is used to discussing with someone they don't know well, and it can be very uncomfortable. Any skeletons in the closet will be uncovered and laid open, and although your social worker will be sensitive, it can be awkward at times.

You'd think this would be the end of the intrusion, but it's just the beginning!

With two children in placement and space for a third we barely have a week go by without a professional at our house. Our social worker Jane visits every 2-3 months, the children's social workers visit every 6 weeks, we have visits from health visitors, portage, dieticians, speech therapists, independent reviewing officers and court appointed guardians. Any of these can also bring a student at any time!

Contact is an intrusion on family life whether it occurs in the family home or not. We organise our lives around our children's contact sessions and are scrutinised by the birth parents and the contact supervisors on the clothes we send the children in, the car seat we've provided, the snacks we send for them, the information we choose to write in the contact book, even down to the brand of nappies and wipes.

We had a lady from portage come to see Belle recently. She arrived on a day when Peter was unwell and off school, and Peter and I were building a marble run together. The portage lady came into the living room, looked genuinely surprised, and said "oh it's lovely that you take an interest in the children." Excuse me? What on earth was she expecting?

Above all, there is the constant scrutiny and feeling of being judged by everyone - social workers, parents, health visitor, therapists, school, and even random people who know that the child is looked after. For some reason, when a child is looked after people feel that they have a right to comment on their upbringing as part of some sort of shared social responsibility. You wouldn't believe the questions and comments that are said to us with the children standing right there.

The good news is that local authorities have a policy that fostering shouldn't interfere with family life, as a stable family life is exactly what looked after children need. We are allowed to, and have, requested for meetings and contact sessions to be rearranged to fit in with family plans. We have a LAC review for Belle at our house this week and because it's half term, Peter will be present. We've warned everyone that we don't know how he will cope with having his living room full of strangers, and if it looks like it's having a negative effect on him we will end the meeting early and rearrange.

Having a lack of privacy is one thing for us as adults, but we still need to advocate for the children we care for and make sure that being in a fostering family and having our lives open for surveillance is not negatively affecting them.

Information overload (or not)

After my previous post about how hard it can be to make the decision whether or not to take a placement, I thought I'd write a post about how the process and how much information we get.

When the duty team call, their first questions are always clarifying who we have in placement (for some reason they didn't know about Andy whilst he was here so we had a couple of calls as they thought his room was empty) and where they're sleeping. The type of house we live in, how many bedrooms we have and the sleeping arrangements are on our records. Having clarified that we have the space available (if not the actual beds - we had to rush out and buy Andy a cot!) they tell us the age and gender of the child/ren they're looking to place, as well as the timescale - emergency same-day, short notice, planned. Most placements are planned in advance even if it's just by a few days, as the duty team are informed that a case is going to court, or that a situation looks to have escalated.

If we're still interested, they tell us more information if they have it available, for example:
- the area of the county they come from
- why the child has been/will be taken into care
- whether the child is currently in care, and how many placements they've had
- what the contact arrangements are likely to be
- a little bit about the parents' history i.e. if they've had a chaotic upbringing or were in care themselves, whether they've had any previous children taken into care
- finally, a bit about the child including whether they're meeting milestones, if they're in school/nursery, whether they sleep/eat well, whether there are any behavioural or emotional concerns etc.

Unless it's respite or a planned move from another foster carer, it's never absolutely certain when the child might arrive, or even whether they will come into care, but the duty team need to have placements arranged just in case. Courts can cause delays too for various reasons and the social worker might not get the outcome they expect. It's also not guaranteed that the child would come to us even if we said yes, as it's likely that the duty team will have approached several carers at once, and may have called fostering agencies too.

When the child arrives, or within the first few days, we should receive a care plan and placement plan, which should have all the details of the case so far, the child's current routine, contact arrangements, medical/allergy details, any self-care or hygiene needs, behaviours, learning needs, school/nursery/clubs information, likes/dislikes. If it's respite or they're coming from another foster carer the information should be far more detailed to try to make the transition easier on the child i.e. that she likes a specific type of cup, singing a special song at bedtime, watching a certain tv programme to signal that it's time for bed, he'll only fall asleep in the buggy cuddling his favourite toy etc. We should also get the child's red book if they're under five.

Whether or not all of this information is available is down to each individual situation - where the child has come from, how quickly they need to be placed, how long the family have been known to social services, and ultimately how conscientious the social worker is at chasing everything down, even if it's not available on the day. From our own experiences and those of other foster carers we've spoken to, it's generally an exercise in piecing facts together over time to build up a full picture, and muddling along doing the best we can in the mean time.

The Baby Show, CWDC and are we really just "other" to the children we foster?

Esmeralda and I have finally finished our CWDC! This is the workbook/portfolio that all foster carers have to complete in the first year, detailing evidence that we have and are applying the knowledge and skills crucial to foster care. It's the sort of thing that is very exciting when you hear about it during training, but very boring once actually started. It was quite a slog to get through the last third or so, but we wanted to get it finished in advance of our (early) annual review which is happening on Thursday with our social worker Jane.

We went to the Baby Show at the NEC on Saturday. It was just an excuse for a day out really as we didn't need to buy anything (although that said we did come back with a buggy laden down with shopping bags) and it was heavily geared towards expectant or new parents, but Jack-Jack really enjoyed trying out all the toys and we got lots of freebies. Jack-Jack especially liked the Little Tikes stay and play area, but his favourite part of the whole day was the free helium balloon he got from the Vtech stand - it kept him amused all the way home!

We have noticed that although it's quite common to see "parent/carer" on posters, websites and other information, when it comes to filling out forms relating to a child it's a different story. Writing in a free text box is fine, but wherever it's necessary to choose your relationship to a child from a drop down list online, the choices seem to be restricted to: mother, father, grandparent or other relative, friend or other. I've recently taken to emailing companies asking them to add "foster carer" or even just "carer" to the list, to be more inclusive and give carers some visibility, but have yet to receive a positive reply.

Support worker visit

We had a visit from our support worker today, who came round to see how we're getting on, and to explain how to fill in some of the recording forms we need to do for Jack-Jack. When we told her that he arrived with absolutely nothing and that we've had to completely set him up, she suggested that we send proof of our receipts to Jane and see whether she could authorise a one-off payment to help towards the cost. Apparently this is discretionary and does occasionally happen. Although we don't get paid to foster, we do receive a fortnightly allowance that's supposed to cover Jack-Jack's needs - we've calculated that it will take almost two months of that just to cover what we've spent on him in the last 10 days, and by then he'll be in the next size up of clothes and will need a whole new wardrobe anyway so we'll be back to square one! The support worker also told us about a session that's taking place in a couple of weeks for foster carers to learn more about the matching and placement process which sounds interesting. It will be a good opportunity to meet other local carers anyway!

Jack-Jack has contact planned for tomorrow again, although if it keeps snowing at this rate I don't know whether the sessional worker will be able to get here to pick him up! I hope it does go ahead - it's been almost two weeks now since he saw his mum and it must be so confusing for him. They've told us that contact is due to be three times a week - if this is the case then the sooner it starts the better, so that it can become part of his new routine.

We're all new to this weaning thing, but Jack-Jack's very curious about food (especially if we're eating it at the same time) and is very happy to try anything we give him. He's now tried (aside from baby food) banana, rice cake, spaghetti shapes, toast and margarine, breadsticks, peeled grapes, blueberries, pasta and pesto, baked potato, tomato, cucumber, red pepper, lettuce, bread, a corner of a bourbon biscuit, cauliflower, carrot, broccoli, crumpet, innocent smoothie and weetabix. He's also had some extremely diluted fruit juice, but seems to prefer water (or sips of our smoothie if we're having some - we may have to start hiding in cupboards to drink it so that he doesn't notice - his "sips" are remarkably large for one so small!)

Paperwork

Our social care worker came to visit us on Friday, to go through some paperwork with us and drop off an enormous folder of various policies and procedures for us to read through over Christmas.

Fostering involves a LOT of paperwork.

• To start with, we had to complete an initial application form to apply to become foster carers.
• We then had to return a form, once invited to attend the Skills to Foster training, to confirm that we still wanted to go.
• We completed activities and case studies every week for six weeks, plus filled in our 217-page workbook.
• At the end of the training, we filled in a form about our experiences and what we'd learned.
• We filled in a form about Lady - what training she's had, where she sleeps, when she's exercised etc.
• We drew an eco map detailing our support network.
• We wrote out our family trees.
• We wrote a detailed description of our local area.
• We then spent three months with Jane visiting our home every couple of weeks, talking through  and completing what was to become our "Form F" - this ended up being 91 pages without the references (as we weren't allowed to see them - there were two employer references, one past partner reference, two personal references and two family references, and each of those involved the person filling in a form, speaking to Jane on the phone, and then signing off a summary of the discussion.)
• We filled in an enhanced CRB form, which involved looking up every address we've lived at since birth - for me that was 25 different addresses!
• We completed a "Safer Caring" policy for our home.
• We chased our medical reports from our GP.
• We wrote to our landlords to request a letter confirming they weren't intending to sell the house from under us.
• We filled in a form to confirm our bank details for fostering allowance payments.
• We created various spreadsheets to track purchases we've made, detailing our set-up costs.
• We read through and made notes on two full drafts of the Form F before it was submitted to Panel.

Since we've been approved, we've had to fill in a child-friendly profile sheet about us and our house (including photos!) and we've been sent a form to fill in about our experiences of the assessment process and Panel. We also have to send a template letter to our insurance company to let them know we are now foster carers.

We have to have a meeting with Jane to sign various agreements and charters.

Once a foster placement arrives, the paperwork steps up another notch. For every child or baby who lives with us, for however long that might be, we will need to complete (this is not an exhaustive list):

• A placement plan - this is several pages long and contains all the child's details, times of agreed contact with birth family, likes/dislikes, medications, education etc.
• Care plan
• Child-specific Safer Caring policy
• Daily recording sheets detailing anything significant the child has done, achieved or said that day, or any behaviours they've had.
• Fortnightly expenditure forms.
• Birthday/festival/holiday allowance forms.
• Accident reports.

We will have various meetings, supervision sessions and reviews that we need to prepare for.

During the first year that we foster, we have to complete the Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC) induction standards for foster care. This is a 25-page workbook that we fill in with our Social Care Worker - it's essentially to provide evidence of our skills, knowledge and achievement relating to caring for looked after children and is based on a national minimum benchmark.

We also have to file an annual tax return as we're classed as self-employed.

It looks crazy seeing it all written down!

Coming from working in a fairly "paperless" office where the vast majority of data is held electronically, the amount of paperwork we've come across in the last 6 months of this process has been quite shocking!

Esmeralda thinks the Council should have a policy like Velvet toilet tissue, where they plant three trees for every one that's cut down and turned into forms... Now, where's that comment card..?