Face to Face Foster Carer Training

Foster Carer Training

Training foster carers has been a passion of mine since 2006 when I became a full time training consultant for a large national fostering agency. As the regional trainer for the South West of England and Wales, I was either developing new training courses, travelling or presenting training courses to foster carers and social workers.

The foster carers I have trained over the years (approximately nine thousand to date), appreciate good face to face training for a number of reasons. They include new ideas, knowledge, skills and their ongoing professional development as foster carers. They also enjoy meeting up with new and existing foster carers, again sharing ideas, building on their support networks and just seeing other foster carers, who know the challenges they may be experiencing. Not all foster carers have the opportunity to attend support groups, so some foster carers use their ongoing training to provide ongoing support.

Benefits

To provide an example of the benefits of face to face training, I recently presented some Safeguarding training to a small group of foster carers and because of the size of the group, we were able to use the foster carers real life fostering difficulties/scenarios as case studies, rather than the fictional ones that I normally use for this particular training. Two sets of these foster carers were considering giving up on their placements because of significant safeguarding issues in the home. This was an opportunity to spend a considerable amount of time exploring the foster carers difficulties and challenges, with the group providing specific responses and strategies for these carers to try in their home environment. Both of these carers continued to care for their children and the breakdown of their placements was averted. I am confident that this was partly due to the work that we undertook in the training room, which is not always possible with a busy supervising social worker.

Blended learning is currently a ‘buzz’ word in foster carer training, which incorporates traditional training methods’ such as face to face and eLearning. This training is good for ‘hard to reach’ foster carers who don’t attend training, maybe because they work or they live in rural areas and there is no local training available. Unfortunately, more and more fostering agencies are using ELearning as a replacement for face to face training, with one of the main reasons being the financial saving. As long as the box gets ticked then the fostering agencies are fulfilling their requirement to provide training for their foster carers.

Over the past ten years I have seen a significant decline in face to face opportunities being offered to foster carers. In some cases only one face to face course a year and three two hour Elearning courses are considered as acceptable as providing continuing professional development by the fostering agency. Foster carers are dealing with behaviours from abused and neglected children that are more challenging and acutely dysfunctional than ever before, and they need motivated, experienced and knowledgeable trainers. These trainers are able to provide environments which are conducive to productive learning, as well as all of the other benefits mentioned earlier.

The Future

Let’s not kid ourselves that the iPad, PC, laptop or smart phone has all of the answers, as in my opinion and that of most foster carers, there is no substitute for face to face training.

If you are interested in professional foster carer training, with feedback scoring " Excellent in 98% of scores", please take a look at the new Simply Fostering Consultancy 2017 training programme here.