How to Become a Foster Carer with Community Foster Care - Meet a Newly Approved Foster Family
Want to find out how to become a foster carer with Community Foster Care and hear from a family who have done it?
If you’ve been doing your research into how to become a foster carer, you are probably fairly overwhelmed at how much information there is out there, how many fostering companies exist, whether to go with your local authority vs independent fostering agency, what types of fostering you’d want to do and the list goes on…
How to become a foster carer with CFC
Get in touch!
Chat to one of our supervising social workers
Complete a registration of interest form and attend a virtual Meet the Carer information event
Have a supervising social worker perform an initial visit
Attend our Skills to Foster training
Complete an application form
Begin your Form F assessment
Attend fostering panel
Sometimes, you just want to hear directly from people who have been through the fostering process and ask them all your burning questions and that is, by far, the best way to get up to speed and make decisions easier.
Meet our newly approved foster family, Kathryn, Barry, Molly and Fin
Kathryn and Barry and their children, Molly and Fin, are one such family who have recently become a foster family with Community Foster Care. We sat down with them the day after they attended fostering panel (they were approved!) to chat about how they found the fostering assessment with us.
What did we ask them?
We wanted to know how they found their Form F assessment, what their fostering panel experience was like, how they feel ahead of meeting their first foster child and why they chose Community Foster Care.
How to become a foster carer with CFC
1. Get in touch!
If Kathryn and Barry’s video inspires you, the first step to becoming a foster carer with us, is to get in touch! Whether you fill in our contact form, drop into one of our offices or old-school phone us, we would love to hear from you!
2. Chat to one of our supervising social workers
The next step would be to have a chat with one of our supervising social workers who can explore with you whether fostering is the right choice for you, answer any questions you have and give you some background information on the types of fostering our agency offers and who we are as an organisation.
3. Complete a registration of interest form and attend a virtual Meet the Carer information event
If we are both happy to move on to the next step, you would fill in a registration of interest form and we would invite you to our next virtual information event, where you can learn lots more and hear from some of our established foster carers.
4.Have a supervising social worker perform an initial visit
Once you have completed your registration of interest, we would look to book you in for an initial visit. Throughout the pandemic, these have happened virtually but they can also be in person. This is a visit to learn more about you and to see your home and the room(s) that you would be using for fostering.
5. Attend our Skills to Foster training
Once again, if both parties are happy to proceed after the initial visit, we would invite you to attend our Skills to Foster course where you will learn all about fostering and, again, meet some of our experienced foster carers, as well as other members of our team such as our psychotherapists.
6. Complete an application form
If after all that you are absolutely on board and certain that fostering is right for you, we would send you an application form for you to complete and once received we would start your Form F assessment.
7. Begin your Form F assessment
The Form F assessment is made up of many different parts, from collecting background checks and references, to documenting your life’s journey and experience of the world. It is an extremely in depth look at who you are and the experiences that have brought you to where you are today. You will complete these stages alongside a supervising social worker or Form F assessor, so you will never be left to work it all out for yourself, you will have lots of support.
This stage of the process can vary in length of time but as an example, Kathryn and Barry’s Form F to panel timeline was about four months. It all depends on how quickly checks/references etc take to come back to us.
8. Attend fostering panel
So long as your supervising social worker/Form F assessor doesn’t come across any signs or information that would mean you would not be a suitable candidate for fostering, once your Form F is complete you will be invited to attend fostering panel which is made up of a number of independent panel members who have experience in some way of fostering, plus CFC staff members. If the fostering panel are happy with your application, they will recommend you to the ADM decision maker for final sign off. At the point of being invited to panel, it is extremely unlikely that your application will not be accepted. Lots of people find panel daunting but your supervising social worker/Form F assessor would not have proceeded to this point if they didn’t believe you were suitable and our panel members are friendly and want you to succeed.