VI. Alternatives to Adoption, Page 2

Fostering

The first thing that should be said about fostering is that it is emphatically not inferior to adoption. The two types of care serve different functions. In many ways foster care is more challenging than adoption: the children may be more troubled (although the false idea that foster children are all tear-aways or delinquents needs to be knocked sharply on the head), working closely with birth families can be very difficult, and there is the constant knowledge that you will probably lose the children to their birth families or another foster or adoptive family. Fostering requires special qualities of people. It is not discussed here with the idea that it is an alternative for people who aren’t “good enough” to be adopters, but because it is different. Some people make good adopters but would not make very good foster carers; some would make much better foster parents than adopters.

“Foster care” covers a number of different ways of caring for children. Some of them might be possibilities for people who are not suited to adopt, for example, because of age. Some of them are possible ways to get experience for people who aren’t ready to adopt yet. But at the outset I have to make it clear that fostering is no longer a realistic back door to adoption.

Up until a few years ago it was not uncommon for people to have foster children placed with them and after a few years they would adopt them. Fostering came to be seen as a kind of back door to adoption, but this is no longer the case. Good adoption and fostering agencies (the same local authority departments and voluntary societies usually include both types of placement) now make a definite separation between the two functions. They have lost too many good foster parents by letting them adopt, whereupon they stop fostering.

That said, you can in fact still apply to adopt a child whom you are fostering, even against the wishes of the local authority and the child’s parents. You can apply to adopt after five years, or earlier, with the agency’s agreement. The law on this point is complicated and you will need a solicitor’s help.

On the other hand, the UK is now beginning to use some different care planning methods which can be seen, from the potential adopter’s point of view, as a return to fostering as a back door to adoption under a different name, but with a large element of uncertainty attached to it: concurrent planning and parallel or twin-track planning. Both are designed to cut down on the time a child stays in care, by making two different care plans from the start, with rehabilitation as the first option and adoption as the second option, instead of waiting until rehabilitation has been shown to be impossible before starting to plan for adoption.

Parallel or Twin-Track Planning

This kind of care planning involves placing a child in a rehabilitation foster family to try to achieve a reunion with the birth family. But at the same time, the social workers will have already decided that if the rehabilitation doesn’t happen successfully within a specified time, that the child will be available for adoption by another family, without the need for further consultation or planning, but not by the rehabilitation foster family.

Concurrent Planning

This is basically the same as parallel planning, except that the child, instead of being moved to a second new family for adoption, stays with the original foster family. This calls for a lot from the foster family. They will know from the start that the child may move back with the birth family or stay to be adopted by them, but they must co-operate with the rehabilitation programme, even though if they are successful it means losing the child. Only pretty special families will be able to resist the temptation to try to sabotage the rehabilitation in order to keep the child for themselves. One adoption and fostering agency tells potential foster families in this situation that there is a 50/50 chance of them being able to keep the child.

Private, Agency or Local Authority Fostering?

There are three methods for arranging the foster care of children.

The most common is through the local authority. Local authority foster carers are assessed in much the same way as are prospective adopters, but the social workers are looking for different qualities, some of which are gone into in other parts of this section. The preparation is different, too, because foster carers do quite a different job from adopters. Children being looked after by the local authority can be coming into foster care for any reason and for any length of time. Most local authorities pay foster carers for the upkeep of the children, plus extra allowances for special expenses or enhancements for children who need particularly intensive parenting.
Voluntary and for-profit agencies also recruit, assess and train foster carers. Some of these agencies also handle adoptions, but not necessarily. Almost all of the children handled by voluntary and for-profit agencies will have special needs, and will need experienced, specially skilled foster carers with a lot of professional backup, which is provided by the agencies. The children will have been referred to them by local authorities. These agencies recruit carers through advertisements in journals such as Community Care, and can be contacted directly. Rates of pay reflect the extra difficulties these children present and the level of skill expected in the foster carers. It is possible to make a proper professional career from agency foster care if you are very skilled and really love the work.
Finally, there is private fostering. Arrangements for private fostering are made directly between the foster carer and the parents of the child. The foster carers are supposed to be assessed by the local authority and their premises inspected, and all such arrangements are supposed to be notified to the local social services department; but a lot of this care goes on under the counter: unassessed, uninspected and unnotified. Private fostering in Britain has become associated with children attending school too far away from home to commute daily, young children of foreign students attending British universities, British parents temporarily living abroad, etc. In particular, private fostering is associated with the children of West African students at British universities, most especially of Nigerians. Rates of pay are directly negotiated between the parents and the carers. Some carers in these arrangements have been left with the children but no financial payments or legal status when the parents disappear back overseas.

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