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Data protection legislation controls how your personal information is used by organisations, businesses or the government. Fostering services have access to a variety of personal data including sensitive personal data when working with fostering applicants, foster carers, children and young people, birth families, social care staff workforce, fostering panel members and so on.
Over the last few years in each of the four nations of the UK there have been improvements to the mechanisms and guidance around day-to-day decision making (often called delegated authority). However, despite these improvements it is clear that guidance is not consistently being applied in practice across the UK and foster carers are still not always being trusted to make decisions, which ultimately impacts on the child and can hinder their ability to participate in normal family, school or social activities.
Fostering services are inspected in different ways as defined by the inspection framework governing the service type, whether that's public sector services such as local authorities or health and social care trusts or independent fostering providers. In England the regulatory body, Ofsted, inspects local authority fostering services as part of the Independent Local Authority Children’s Services (ILACS) inspection of the whole of children’s’ services in the authority.
The Children Act 1989 Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) Regulations 2010 regulation 5 states that every child must have a health plan as part of their overall care plan. Paragraphs 2.49 – 2.64 describe how local authorities should produce and monitor the health assessment and health plan.
In recent years fostering services have increasingly expressed concern about the difficulties with the system of obtaining health information about prospective foster carers. In response to this issue The Fostering Network, CoramBAAF and the Nationwide Association of Fostering Providers (NAFP) have jointly surveyed its fostering service members in England in Winter 2019/20 to understand more about the issue and its wider impact on fostering.
The Fostering Network published Safer Caring: A New Approach to challenge the ‘risk averse’ culture that had developed within children’s social care across the UK. This groundbreaking book introduced a new way of thinking about principles for safeguarding children and young people in foster care at the same time as offering guidance to protect foster carers and their families from complaints and allegations. Safer Caring: A New Approach is a vital resource for everyone involved in the care of fostered children and young people.
It is imperative that all managers, practitioners, foster carers and young people are informed of and are familiar with the statutory requirements and entitlements enshrined in staying put legislation, statutory guidance, good practice guidance, local policy and governance. In addition all key stakeholders need to be aware of and able to access the learning and development opportunities available.
The Children and Families Act 2014 (section 98) made amendments to the Children Act 1989 by inserting section 23CZA. Although local authorities can provide ‘staying put’ type arrangements to any care leaver, a legal requirement was placed on local authorities to advise, assist and support both the young person and their former foster carers when they wish to stay living together after the ‘former relevant child’ reaches their 18th birthday. This is known as a ‘staying put arrangement’.
