'Everyone needs a multitude of relationships – we don't just have a single relationship.'

Kevin Williams is?the chief executive of the Fostering Network, the UK's leading charity supporting foster carers and fostering services. For the latest episode of our?‘In Conversation With’ series, we chatted to Kevin about this month’s Foster Care Fortnight, and why foster carers are important now more than ever.

With Foster Care Fortnight taking place this month, Kevin is keen to start our discussion by recognising the fantastic work that foster carers do in supporting children and young people.

“It’s a real opportunity to show the difference that foster care makes to young people and how it helps them to achieve their dreams,” says Kevin. It’s also an opportunity for services to think about recruitment of foster carers.”

Currently, there is a shortage of foster carers, with at least 8,000 needed to ensure children can remain in local communities – precisely the reason community is the theme of this year's Foster Care Fortnight.?

“We want to recognise that children are part of their community,” adds Kevin. “They have friends, relationships with school, and with family.” He explains that it’s these things that make it so essential for young people to remain part of their community, adding that maintaining those relationships means it is more likely that foster placements will last longer and to be more stable for those young people.?

Kevin says there are often misconceptions that foster care is short-term, and that foster carers look after lots of children. But while this is true for many, there is also a need for foster carers to look after one child or sibling group.

The vast majority of children that come into care and remain there for over six months are likely to remain in care for the duration of their childhood, highlighting the importance of establishing long-term relationships.?

“When you establish relationships based on honesty and trust, you can work with young people to look at their background, what it is that brought them into care, and help them overcome those challenges and difficulties that they might have faced.”

As well as making a difference to young people's health – so enabling young people to attend their medical appointments, or having access to doctors and dentists, for example – foster carers can also help young people to explore their hobbies and interests. The latter is an important source of companionship and membership in the local community, something that young people in care often lack.

“Historically, young people leaving care have told us that one of the real challenges they face is isolation, [having found] themselves alone in potentially inappropriate accommodation in the past.”

With UK legislation now allowing young people to remain in foster care over the age of 18, they can be better supported on their journey to independence, making them less likely to take on too much at a young age.

Young people in care often go to university later, if they didn’t initially perform as well as they wanted to academically, for example. Kevin explains that it’s really important that we take a ‘whole life view’ of young people, rather than having cut-off points where support stops. “It’s a continual, gradual process of letting go and bringing young people back in to support,” he says.??

Foster carers play a vital role in helping young people to reach that level of independence by asking themselves what skills young people might need and how they can support them in achieving those??– whether that’s by helping with the cooking, or having conversations about managing money, wellbeing, or mental health. For the majority of children that come into care at an earlier age, these are skills they will learn in the foster home on a daily basis.?

Kevin explains that while the role of social workers, teachers, and other professionals is important, for most young people, their key relationship will be with their foster careers, so being able to support them is key.

Unfortunately, many foster carers report to the Fostering Network that the money they receive from the state isn’t sufficient to meet their young person’s needs. “That cannot be right,” says Kevin. “If we've got an 8,000 shortage of foster carers, do we expect those foster carers to subsidise the state's care?”??

He adds that emotional support for foster carers is of equal importance. “Looking after young people who have been traumatised can be challenging, and it can impact on foster carers’ own wellbeing. So it's really important that we give space and time for foster carers to look after themselves.”

Kevin suggests that foster carers receive supervision in the way that other professionals are given and that there is a proper understanding of the impacts on them.

We move on to the subject of the ‘Mockingbird Family Model’ – something we agree is key to providing a community.

“It's almost like an extended family,” says Kevin. The Mockingbird Model offers a level of peer support so that foster carers can support each other and provides a range of adults for young people to develop relationships with. Kevin also says it takes some of the pressure off of foster carers, adding that retention is as important as recruitment.?

“[Everyone needs] a multitude of relationships – we don't just have a single relationship. Relationships [provide] us with different things where we get different advice and different levels of support.”

We ask Kevin for his take on how well the government and local authorities have supported foster carers during the pandemic, particularly given that they were not identified as key workers.?

“I think we saw a bit of a postcode lottery around the type of support that was offered, although when it comes to vaccination, some local authorities did prioritise them,” he says. “We would have wanted to see a much more coherent approach from governments.”

Kevin talks about the pandemic pushing the individualisation of care. Focusing much more on individual children or sibling groups to make sure that their needs were being met is something he believes empowered foster carers much more. “They were with those children all of the time, making those decisions on a day-to-day basis,” he says.?

For many young people, the pandemic also wasn't as bad as it could have been. Not having that peer pressure all of the time and not having the bullying going on in school, feeling securely attached to their foster carers, and knowing that they were being cared for during this time lessened the stress and [improved the] emotional well-being [of many young people].”

That being said, Kevin acknowledges that it also became a tougher time for many. “Clearly, the longer it went on, the more difficult that became. For some young people, it was stressful and it reflected back on trauma and past experience that they've had. But I think there was also some really good things that came out of the pandemic for foster carers recognising their role in education.”?

“I think it would be a shame if we reverted back to doing things the way we did them before the pandemic,” he adds. “We know that contact with families became much more fluid through the use of interactive contact. Young people found that extremely helpful, and it meant the contact could often be more regular.”

That being said, ultimately, Kevin believes the government did not respond in a systemic way. He recalls some difficult stories of foster carers being told that they needed to undertake face-to-face contact during the pandemic without any recognition of the impact on them or their families – something which further alienated many foster carers.?

While the government made schools available for children with a social worker, foster carers wanted their young people to be treated the same way as everybody else. The possibility that foster children may come into contact with coronavirus and bring it back to the family home was an additional concern during this time.?

“At one level, we want to treat foster carers and foster children the same as their peers, and in others, we absolutely treat them differently but don’t respect the need,” says Kevin. “For some young people, it was absolutely right that schools were open and they went into school in order to provide them with the education, but also to make sure that placement was able to continue because looking after a young person who can be very challenging 24 hours a day, seven days a week without any time where that young person is around again can be really stressful for foster carers.”

While there clearly wasn’t a one size fits all approach to the pandemic, Kevin says the government failed to take a strategic approach that said ‘what are the issues that we really need to deal with?’ or ‘let’s not force blanket rules, let’s try and use foster carers’ own experience and the knowledge of the young people that are caring for.’ The state could provide extra funding and support, particularly when social work visits were not taking place in the same way.

While The Care Review has an important role to play in how to care for young people changes going forwards, the impact of wider social policies around poverty, poor housing, racism, and sexism – all of those things that impact the community – are missing.?

“Why is it that children become abused and neglected?” he says. “Is it because of the stresses that families find themselves under because of poverty, because of poor housing, because of reverting to short-term fixes of alcohol and drugs? That bit, for me, seems to be absolutely missing from The Care Review.” Kevin hopes that The Care Review will begin to look at the whole child from birth right through to adulthood. “What is it that we as a society want to provide care for, and what is it we want to achieve?”

“We need to try and find a way for the state to look beyond this arbitrary age of 18 or 20 years old in how we continue to support people because it's the cliff edge of care that I think leads to those poorer outcomes.”?

Kevin concludes our discussion with some food for thought. “The care system absolutely needs to acknowledge that it's looking after young people in preparation for them to become the happy, productive adults that we want them to be.”

“My message to foster caregivers is you are a really (if not the most) important part of that journey for many young people.”

“Thank you.”

You can hear the full conversation with Kevin here - https://www.buzzsprout.com/1956030/10513571