common question

what is the role of a foster carer?

what’s the role of a foster carer?

There are many different types of foster care, meaning there are many different roles available as a foster carer. Fundamentally though, the core of every foster carer’s role is the same: to provide a safe and supportive home for a child or young person in need.

Foster carer roles and responsibilities, carried out with passion, can change a foster child’s life.

foster care meaning

By definition, foster care is the care of a child by someone who is not their legal parent, usually for a limited period of time.

There are, however, several different ways that you can foster, and with different types of fostering come different skills and requirements that are needed from you and your home.

what is foster care?

The three broad categories of foster care are short-term, long-term, and specialist.

Short-term fostering can mean taking care of a child for any length of time from a day through to a year. It generally means you’re willing and able to step in whenever your foster child needs you, as well as helping us to find a long-term home for them if they cannot return to their birth family.

Long-term fostering is about offering a permanent home to a foster child, but not adopting them. You can find out more about this in our blog: 5 differences between fostering and adopting

Specialist fostering could be part of short or long-term fostering. It might involve sharing your parenting skills with the foster child’s birth parent, fostering a young refugee, or a child with more complex needs.

You can also help a young person aged 16-21 bridge the gap between living in care and independent living, and more.

how does fostering work?

The fostering assessment process can be somewhat lengthy, but that’s because we take great care to make sure every foster child is welcomed into a safe and happy home.

A lot of foster carers will focus on fostering a particular age range, like babies or teenagers. Foster carers can also care for multiple children at once, usually up to three. There can, however, be exceptions for situations involving large groups of siblings – wherever possible, we’ll aim to keep groups of siblings together when they enter foster care.

what do foster carers do?

Your role as a foster carer is to support the child in your care, however they need it. As their day-to-day carer, you’ll need to advocate for their wellbeing both emotionally and physically, as well as support them with their education, and help your foster child to maintain a relationship with their birth family too.

Many children in the foster care system come from traumatic backgrounds or have had negative past experiences at home. This makes it extra-important that foster carers are patient and understanding people who are keen to learn new parenting skills.

On the admin side of things, you’ll be asked to keep records and attend regular meetings with us.

what is a foster parent?

It’s simply another name for a foster carer. Some people prefer ‘carer’ as it represents the professional side of the role and it is distinctively different from ‘birth parent’. However, others prefer to use ‘parent’, especially if they are fostering a child long term.

It’s someone who provides short or long-term care to a child in the foster system, giving them a nurturing environment where they can simply be a child.

A safe and supportive foster family can turn a child’s life around. By fostering through Foster Wales, we can work together to be that difference, and give children in Wales the environment they need to grow up happy and healthy. It’s an incredibly rewarding experience to see a child flourish in your care. You can find out where your local Foster Wales team is based through our home page, or get more information about the fostering process by looking at more of our FAQs.

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