A Fostering Journey 99

There was I, in my last blog, talking about how quiet life was and how relaxed we are when we got a call asking us to take 9 year old lad, H, on a respite placement. H was with a local single carer who had broken her ankle and was ‘laid up’ for a couple of weeks. So we agreed and I headed off to collect him. From his carer’s house which was about 5 minutes away. We had met the carer before at a carer’s meeting so we were happy to help out and she was happy that H was coming to us. His school was close by as well so transporting him was no issue. H was a lovely lad and fitted in pretty much straight away. He had been in care for about 3 years and his Local Authority (LA) was actively looking for adoptive parents. Although H was placed with the LA they were trying to convince his Foster Carer to adopt him, even though they risked losing a Carer. The Carer had three children of her own so hadn’t really considered adoption so she was not being pressured into making a decision. We all explained to H what would be happening and the fact that he was only with us short term. We agreed that we would enable H to regularly visit his carer just to reassure him that she was not moving him on and that nobody was sleeping in his bedroom. I took him into school and introduced myself but also made it clear that any communication should continue with his actual carer and not us. We had actually had one young placement in this school and we were aware of how well organised they were and how good that were with Looked After Children (LAC). Schools get a reputation, locally, and you learn which ones you want to place LAC with and which ones to avoid. It was the same with GPs too; you know which ones to register children with. I would always carry out a review of local facilities to see which would be advantageous for us to use. We always kept a list of Schools, Doctors and Dentists and would use that if the situation involved us having to register a young person or people. Locally we were blessed with good schools and excellent dentists but finding a decent GP could be problematic. With GPs you were dictated by locality and the GPs near us were heavily subscribed and not very proactive. Our local Dentist was excellent and she had been in care herself for a short period so was always happy to help out, where she could. Schools were checked via Ofsted reports and recommendation. Having grown up locally it was easy to label schools from what I remembered but a lot of them had changed and had either improved or otherwise. I went to a Grammar School which had subsequently become a Comprehensive and had gone from having an excellent reputation to have an awful one. So if you move or if you are new at Fostering take some time, go online and check out what you have locally.