Independent fostering providers: predators or pioneers, partners or procured?

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Report - Survey

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Independent fostering providers: predators or pioneers, partners or procured?

Introduction

The public sector was the almost exclusive provider of fostering placements for children in care in Britain for much of the second half of the 20th century (Pringle, 1998; Hendrik, 2005). Local authorities were generally able to recruit, approve and provide sufficient numbers of foster carers at a time when as many or more children in care were living in residential homes (Berridge, 1985; Sinclair and Gibbs, 1998; Bullock, 1999). Most of the fostered children were younger when they joined their foster families and many grew up in long-term care, when a care order deprived birth parents of all parental rights or responsibilities, short of opposing the adoption or emigration of their children (Thoburn, 1999). Those who were fostered tended not to have presented the difficulties described by Sinclair and his colleagues in their subsequent study of fostered children in seven local authorities, who:

... might steal, lie, break things, have tantrums, refuse to eat, smear walls, wet their beds, refuse to bath, continually defy their carers, set light to their bedding, take overdoses, make sexual advances to other children, expose themselves in public, make false allegations, attack others, truant, take drugs or get into trouble with the police. (Sinclair et al, 2000, p 3)

Children with these emotional and behavioural problems, who were often older, had been placed for many years in residential rather than foster care. A range of facilities had been available, from reception, observation and assessment centres to therapeutic settings and community homes with education (Kahan, 1994). However, child placement patterns had begun to shift from residential to foster care by the 1980s. The accepted wisdom that fostering provided a more sensitive and nurturing experience of care, and at reduced costs, led Shaw and Hipgrave (1983, p 16) to contend that 'the blending of psychiatry and finance produced a heady brew'.

This change in direction in child care policy, leading to a significant shift in placement practice, came with unintended but predictable consequences. A simple law of economics, tha...

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