Are you wondering what sort of foster care is right for you? There are several different types of foster care, and we will help you decide which one will best suit your circumstances.
Long term fostering
Long-term fostering provides a child or young person with a secure, stable, and loving home for an extended period, often until they turn 18. This type of care is for children who cannot return to their birth families, and adoption is not a suitable option. It offers crucial consistency, helping children build trust and form healthy attachments, allowing them to thrive and reach their potential.
Maintaining ongoing contact with a child's birth family plays a vital role in supporting their overall wellbeing and where appropriate, foster carers facilitate regular communication and engagement with parents, siblings, and other significant family members.
Short term fostering
Short-term foster care offers children a safe and nurturing temporary home, typically ranging from overnight to a couple of years, while long-term arrangements are being determined such as reunification with their birth family or placement in a permanent home. This type of care often supports children through critical periods including assessments, legal proceedings, or family challenges such as illness or breakdown.
Our short-term foster carers provide a stable and supportive environment, facilitate ongoing contact with birth families where appropriate, and play a vital role in preparing children for their next chapter - whether that involves returning home, transitioning to long-term foster care, or joining an adoptive family.
Respite
Some children need to be looked after for a short period on a regular basis to help provide stability and support for their main foster placement. This could be for one or two weekends per month for the same child.
This type of fostering can work well for carers who wish to keep their current working commitments and provide respite care at the weekends.
Parent and child fostering
Parent and child fostering is about supporting a young mother or father, or sometimes both parents together, to take their first steps as a new parent. You will be guiding a young parent to do things for themselves and their child, rather than taking care of the child directly.
These placements can also assist social workers to assess parenting capacity and help determine whether or not a young parent has the ability to safely care for their child independently.
Short break care for children with disabilities
Some children with disabilities need to be looked after for regular short breaks or longer periods of time. They may have a significant learning disability and also have further needs such as physical disabilities, complex health needs and challenging behaviour. You don’t need to have experience of disability to be a disability foster carer, although this would be helpful. We provide training to improve your skills and support you. However, you do need to have time, energy and flexibility and enough space in your life and home, plus a willingness to have any necessary adaptations made to your home, e.g. a ramp, a hoist or even a lift in extreme cases. Disabled children needing care range from babies to teenagers and disability fostering can consist of short term, long term or short breaks - say, an afternoon each month.
Family based short breaks provide opportunities for children and young people with disabilities to have enjoyable social experiences with their foster family as well as providing a valuable break for their parents or carers.
Specialist fostering
Other types of foster care in Bromley
Fostering for adoption
Fostering for Adoption places a child with adopters who are also temporarily approved as foster carers. If the court agrees that the child should be adopted and the adoption agency approves the ‘match’ between the carers as adopters and the child, the placement becomes an adoption placement.
Friends and family care
Friends and family care refers to the care provided to children whose parents are unable to look after them on a short or long-term basis. This could include care provided by other relatives, like grandparents, uncles, aunts or siblings or alternatively also by adults who have a connection to the child, such as neighbours or a close friend of the family.
Friends and family care may be a permanent arrangement which is sometimes formalised through a legal order or could be temporary and informal.
Friends and family carers are also often referred to as kinship carers or connected persons carers. Depending on the specific circumstances and arrangements, friends and family carers will have different rights, responsibilities and support available to them.
The connected persons and special guardianship team provides assessment, training and support of friends and family carers. Please visit our friends and family care page for further information
Private fostering
If a private arrangement is made for a child aged under 16 (18 if they are disabled) to stay with anyone who is not closely related for 28 days or more, this is known as 'private fostering'. Private fostering is legal, but by law you must notify us as soon as the arrangement is made (in other words, not after 28 days). Please visit our private fostering page for further information.
Foster carers handbook
Do you want more information? See the foster carers handbook (online guide).
Let's talk
Complete our contact form to discover all there is to know about becoming a foster parent. We’ll give you a call, when’s it’s convenient for you, answer your questions, and go from there.
Or if you’re free now, why not give us a call. We look forward to hearing from you.