We were now down to three young people in the house and it was amazing what a difference it made, practically, to the young people. The first difference is one less meal to cook and one less set of clothes to wash. Then you look at the aspect of school and one less school to work with, one less contact book to read and one less school run. Then it was one less Social Worker and one less Local Authority. If you add all of that up it comes to quite a lot of work and time. Financially it wasn’t really much of an issue as we still had three young people in placement. From an emotional point of view it was hard as she had been with us for a number of years and we had become very attached to her as had the other children in the house and our own family. The allegation had caused even more upset for us as we knew that it didn’t come from her and that she had to be told to lie, by her Mum, and we hated to think of her having to do that just to appease Mum when all we did was care for her daughter when she was unable to. Unfortunately this is a common occurrence with children placed in care, the Foster Carers tend to face the brunt of parental anger and frustration. However we know we did a great job with the young lady and we were proud of the level of care we provided to her. She was certainly healthier than when she first came to us and she was regularly attending school, making friends and eating a balanced healthy diet. So we move on. I was asked to attend a meeting at the offices of the Local Authority responsible for the three remaining children we were caring for. I attended alone as my wife was carrying out the school runs and the venue for the meeting was a couple of hours drive away from our house. Also at the meeting were The Social Work Team Manager and the Children’s Social Worker.
The discussion was around the fact that the Local Authority didn’t want us to take anymore placements while we had any of their Looked After children in placement. My argument was that if Mum carried out the return of the children in our care in the same way she had with the eldest then we could end up with one placement when we have room for others. With the shortage of carers in the UK we didn’t think it was fair that other children would miss out on a warm placement when we only had one young person in care. We therefore agreed that we would review the situation over the coming months. We would not take any other placements whilst we had the three young people in care but would reconvene if another young person moved on. We had discussed, with the young people, the whole situation regarding how their eldest sister had moved back to their Mum. We had asked them to be honest with us and let us know if Mum tried to contact the. To be honest we were of the opinion that Mum would try to repeat what she had done before and that the children would basically comply with her wishes as they were so desperate to go home. We also believed that it would be done on age order which meant the boy, who was now 15, would be the next.
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