VI. Alternatives to Adoption, Page 3

What’s the Difference Between Adoption and Fostering?

Fostering is different from adoption in several important ways:

Foster children rarely use their foster parents’ names.
Foster parents do not have parental responsibility for the child, which means that all important decisions have to be made or approved by the agency (or parents, in private fostering).
Foster parents automatically receive the boarding-out allowance, which is not means-tested, whereas adoptive parents have to apply for the adoption allowance, which is means-tested as well as discretionary, and may be less than the boarding-out allowance.
Foster parents have no legal relationship with their foster children and bear no legal responsibility for them.
Foster children do not inherit from their foster parents if they die without making a will.
Foster children’s legal relationships with their birth families are not changed, although the birth parents’ right to exercise parental responsibility may have been revoked by the courts.
Foster parents must notify the local authority if they move, and the new premises are subject to inspection and approval.
Foster parents cannot take their foster children away for holiday or abroad without getting permission from the agency (not often a problem, unless it means leaving the agency’s catchment area for a substantial period).
Foster parents cannot emigrate with their foster children.
The agency will continue to be officially involved for as long as the child is in care, and there will be regular visits by the child’s social worker as well as reviews of the placement in which the foster parents need to be involved.
Foster parents have to undergo periodic retraining and take short courses to maintain their place on the agency’s books.
Except in the case of a sibling group, you cannot legally foster more than three children at once, but there is no legal limit to the number you can adopt.
Contact with the birth parents is often part of fostering, which may involve the birth family visiting the home, foster parents ferrying the child to a family visiting centre, supervising visits, etc. This can be both time-consuming and stressful.
Foster parents and children have little security in the placement, which can be terminated at any time without notice or any meaningful right of appeal.

Many of these differences don’t affect the day-to-day running of the family, and things like permission to travel overseas on holiday, while they involve some red tape, will not often be difficult to get. But case conferences, especially in the early stages of a placement, or where a family has a number of foster children or they have special problems, can take a lot of time. And if a foster father, for example, changes jobs and the family needs to move house a long way away, they might not be able to take their foster child with them, depending on the kind of placement and the agency’s rules. (Moving obviously affects things like general continuity of care, visits, schooling, and treatment by therapists.) A foster family with children who need special medical or psychiatric help may spend a lot of time on the road, ferrying them to and fro.

What Kinds of Fostering Are There?

There are a number of different kinds of fostering, serving different children’s and families’ needs. They are not always rigidly demarcated. Sometimes a child’s needs will change during placement, and what started out as a rehabilitation foster placement will turn into pre-adoption or long-term fostering; or an emergency placement may turn into a rehabilitation placement. Different agencies may not use the same terms to describe placements, or they might lump several of the following types together. A good agency will try to keep the child in the same foster placement as long as possible to avoid multiple moves, because every such move is a definite setback for the child. (A good indicator of the quality of an agency is the average number of placements children in their care have.)

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