During Foster Care Fortnight 2015, The Fostering Network will be celebrating the lives of children and young people in foster care, care leavers, and foster carers and their families with a series of celebration days.
The Fostering Network Northern Ireland welcomes the appointment of Simon Hamilton MLA as health minister for Northern Ireland, and is calling on him to make children, and fostering, a priority over the course of his time in office.
Following meetings with all the major UK-wide political parties taking part in the upcoming general election, The Fostering Network is delighted that the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats have chosen to make a commitment to fostering in their manifestos.
The Fostering Network has welcomed the strengthening of long-term foster care in England by new regulations which came into force on 1 April.
The Fostering Network Scotland is delighted that from today, children in foster care in Scotland will have the right to remain living with their foster carers until the age of 21, as the aftercare provisions of the Children and Young People Act 2014 come into force.
The Fostering Network has released its latest statistical findings on the recruitment and retention of foster carers in England. The report Local Authority Fostering Services in England - performance benchmark report 2013/14, has been produced in conjunction with partners iMPOWER Consulting, and funded as part of a two year project by the Department for Education.
Why foster carers care: part 2, produced by The Fostering Network in partnership with consultancy iMPOWER as part of the Department for Education funded project to support fostering services to recruit more foster carers, uses a system for identifying individuals’ values in order to explore in depth the actions and attitudes of foster carers.
Using this Values Modes™ approach, the population of newly approved foster carers was found to be:
The Fostering Network Wales is pleased that the National Assembly for Wales recommendations to the Welsh Government has put a renewed focus on support for care leavers seeking employment, following our response to the National Assembly’s Enterprise and Business Committee’s inquiry on assisting young people into work last November.