One of your most important responsibilities as a foster carer is to keep everyone in your home safe. This means the children and young people in your care, as well as yourself and your other family members. To do this, you’ll need to be aware of the risks involved for children in different situations and make well-thought-through decisions.
What is safer caring?
Safer caring is all about being risk-sensible, not risk-averse. This means having a day-to-day understanding of the risks involved in a particular activity or decision and balancing these risks, rather than applying one set of rules to all situations.
For foster carers, it is about working with a child, their parents and with social workers to develop the right plan to keep a child safe. This is called a ‘safer caring plan’.
What’s in a safer caring plan?
A child’s safer caring plan should include a clear record of the decisions you have made with social workers about the child’s basic routines, behaviour and personal care. It should be regularly reviewed and updated as the child grows, and as your relationship with them develops. A child’s ‘placement plan’ should be clear about when foster carers have ‘delegated authority’ to manage risk and take decisions on a day-to-day basis.
Why is safer caring important?
Foster carers help children to thrive through providing a positive experience of childhood in a family setting. This means keeping children safe in all circumstances, through understanding and managing any known or emerging risks that they face, or may pose. All children and young people need protection from danger but, because of their experiences, children and young people in foster care may be at risk in ways that other children are not.
What are the particular risks facing children in foster care?
Most children face many of the same risks, including being bullied at school and taking risks online. But, for some children in foster care, these risks can be heightened because of their previous experiences. As a foster carer, it’s important to understand the individual child in your care. If they have experienced abuse, or have a history of running away, decisions about how you will manage these risks must be identified in the child’s safer caring plan.
It’s important to remember that, as a foster carer, you are responsible for caring for a child on behalf of ‘the state’. Because of this responsibility, you may be asked to do some things differently for a child in your care, compared to your own children, to keep everyone safe.
Balancing risk
It’s not possible to remove all risk from everyday life. In fact, trying too hard to remove every risk can prevent children from learning and developing their own awareness of how to stay safe. Instead, the key to good safer caring as a foster carer is balancing risks in the everyday decisions you make for yourself, your family and the children in your care.
Your fostering service will have its own guidance about safer caring and may have some standard expectations for all foster carers (for example, that nobody goes into anyone else’s bedroom, and that dressing gowns are always worn over pyjamas). These kind of ‘house rules’ may feel strange at first, but they are designed to help protect everyone.
How do I prepare for safer caring?
There are a number of ways you can prepare yourself to deliver safer caring:
Stay up to date with safer caring
Make sure your knowledge and understanding of safer caring are up to date. This will be covered as part of the initial training you receive as a foster carer, but make sure you attend any additional training offered by your fostering service, including on keeping children safe online.
Read our Safer Caring publication
We will be launching some brand new Safer Caring resources this year. In the meantime, our publication, Safer Caring: A New Approach s written by sector expert, Jacky Slater, and discusses the relevance of safer caring for foster carers, the need for a sensible and balanced approach to risk, and the need for foster carers to be able to make everyday decisions about children and young people in their care (delegated authority).
Regularly update each child’s safer caring plan
Make sure that you have a safer caring plan for each child in your care, as well as their ‘placement plan’. This should be regularly update to reflect the child’s growing maturity and the development of your relationship with them.
Consider your decisions
When you make decisions – for example, about activities the children in your care can do, or what they can look at online – make sure you can show, in your records, how you balanced the risks and thought through your decision. Remember, safer caring is about showing that you can manage risks sensibly, rather than trying to avoid all possible risks.
Follow your fostering service’s guidance
Be clear about, and follow, your fostering service’s guidance about safer caring. This may include an expectation about ‘house rules’, for example, an expectation that people don’t go into one another’s bedrooms or that dressing gowns are always worn over pyjamas.
Be willing to challenge decisions
Foster carers are often the people who know the child best. If you feel a particular approach to managing risk, or the existing safer caring plan for the child, has not got the balance right, think it through and be willing to open up a discussion with your supervising social worker. Even if the final say in a decision does not rest with you, it’s important to contribute your views.
To support the continued implementation of Safer Caring: A New Approach within the current context of foster care, we have produced an extensive collection of supplementary resources that you may find helpful. We will also be launching some brand new Safer Caring resources in 2024. Watch this space for more details!