Foster Care Fortnight highlights the pressures foster carers are facing and gives a voice to everyday experiences

In this blog post for Foster Care Fortnight, Hope Lynch-Gerrard, Policy and Public Affairs Officer for The Fostering Network in Scotland, explains the ideas behind this year’s theme and the hopes she has in the changes new legislation will make for foster carers.

The theme for Foster Care Fortnight is ‘This is Fostering’, celebrating and raising awareness of the different stories across the fostering community. Over the fortnight, The Fostering Network will celebrate the role foster carers play in nurturing and loving children whilst they are being cared for away from their birth families, discuss the challenges and call for change for the fostering community.

The theme this year brings together three key threads.

1. It shines a light on the everyday experiences of fostering, raising awareness of the positive impact foster carers have.
2. It acknowledges the pressures foster carers are facing in today’s climate – from low allowances and fees and inconsistent support, to feeling excluded from decision making about the children in their care.
3. It is a call to action. It gives us a collective platform to stand together as foster carers, kinship carers and the wider fostering community to call on the government for meaningful change.

Changes for foster carers through legislation

As we reflect on foster care in Scotland this Foster Care Fortnight, we are encouraged by the passing of the Children (Care, Care Experience and Services Planning) (Scotland) Bill. The Bill contains significant changes that will directly improve the lives of foster carers and the children and young people they care for.

We worked with our members and MSPs to campaign for three key parts of the Bill:

1. Extending Continuing Care for young people in foster care to up to age 26, if it is necessary for the young person’s welfare. This will ensure young people can stay with their foster families as long as they need to and benefit from a stable home environment.
2. Establishing an annual uprating duty on fostering and kinship allowances in legislation and for services to be required to publish their payment rates. We feel allowances have been frozen for far too long and this is having a huge impact on carers’ ability to provide for the children in their care. These changes will ensure they keep pace with inflation and will increase transparency between services.
3. The development of an independent register of foster carers. We believe that this could be an important tool for safeguarding, the professional recognition of foster carers, ensuring children and young people in need of care are matched to the best family for their needs, and enabling foster carers to transfer between fostering agencies more easily.

Looking to the future for foster carers

We are calling on the new Minister for Children to prioritise care experienced children and young people and foster carers, and we look forward to working with the incoming Scottish Government to achieve more support for foster carers. We’re particularly excited to contribute towards the regulations for the Bill and the ongoing independent review of Scotland’s legislative framework for children’s care that is being led by Professor Kenneth Norrie in partnership with CELCIS.

We’ll continue to work with the Scottish Government to reiterate our long-standing recommendations that we know are so important to foster carers - placing guidance on allegations on a statutory footing, publishing a national recruitment and retention strategy for foster care, and creating a national fee framework. Taking action on these issues will bring about the meaningful change that foster carers are calling for this Foster Care Fortnight.

The views expressed in this blog post are those of the author/s and may not represent the views or opinions of CELCIS or our funders.

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