Niketa Sanderson-Gillard
When a child comes into foster care, it is a period of huge change and uncertainty for them which they have to navigate in a new home. Making sense of what has just happened, trying to figure out what the new normal is, and still managing daily life. We ask foster carers to hold all of that, providing a home and the relationships a child needs to feel safe and stable at a time when the world has probably never felt less so.
The National Minimum StandardsThe National Minimum Standards aim to describe how fostering organisations should assess and support carers to build relationships and create the right homes for children. The Training, Support and Development Standards describe what fostering organisations should help a carer learn and be able to do. They were last written more than a decade ago, and the content has not kept pace with what we have learned about children's needs, or about what carers need to create and sustain these homes.
What good foster care looks likeI have spent my career around fostering: in frontline practice, in policy, and in the work I do now supporting foster carers. One thing has stayed with me throughout. The difference between an okay home and a good one is rarely a procedure. It is a relationship, held by a carer who knows the child and backed by a supportive service that knows what it is doing. Time spent on that relationship, and on genuinely seeing how a child is doing day to day, does more to keep children safe than time spent evidencing a process. Standards can get in the way of that, or they can help enable it. I want these to enable it.
Drafting the new standardsI have drafted these standards alongside foster carers, social workers and care-experienced adults. That felt essential from the start. If these standards are going to support a different culture, they could not be written at a distance from the people whose lives they describe.
Before any drafting began, we agreed the principles everything else would rest on. Every standard starts with what it means for children, and that is the purpose everything else is judged against. The standards describe what services must achieve rather than prescribing how, because there is no single right way to be a foster family and carers need room to do what works for the child in front of them. The relationship between a child and their carer is treated as the thing that keeps children safe and helps them do well, and services are asked to protect and strengthen it. And they are written in plainer language, because standards only work if the people who need to use them can pick them up and understand them.
Strengthening safeguardingThey are also designed to strengthen safeguarding. Children are kept safe by adults who know them and by services that respond quickly and fairly when something goes wrong. In a carer's first year, for example, the focus moves from completing a workbook to showing how knowledge and skill are used in the daily care of a child. That gives carers more time for caregiving, and it gives services a better view of how a child is really doing. Watching care closely is a stronger safeguard than a neatly completed form
My hope is simple. A child should be able to read these standards and know what they have a right to expect. A foster carer should be able to read them and know the same: what is asked of them, and what they can ask of the service around them.
Have your sayThe public consultation is now open. I know the sector has been asked for its views many times in recent years, and that trust in what happens next is not always high. The honest answer is that these standards will only be as good as the scrutiny they get. We want to have conversations across the fostering landscape, with young people, foster carers, kinship carers and everyone who works to support them across the country. We want to know what people think of what we have drafted, where the opportunities are to build on it, where people have concerns or disagree, and where they would like us to go further.
You can respond to the consultation, and we will be out having these conversations over the coming months.
seen at 14:49, 17 July in Children’s social care.