Foster Care Training
Developing everyone to their full potential
Everything we do is geared towards helping people from minority ethnic backgrounds or with specific faith or cultural requirements. We believe that by giving people new skills and understanding, training is an important part of this. It doesn’t just make you a better foster parent. It makes for better and more positive outcomes for children, and that’s why it’s such a big part of our work.
We hold training in local centres, usually during the working week. They’re free to attend and most programmes are a day long (organised around school hours), but some can be more. We expect all of our foster parents to make sure they’re developing continuously, so you’re welcome to attend as many training courses as you want. Your supervising social worker will work with you to identify the most suitable courses at any given time based on your knowledge and experience.
Our foster care training includes:
Pre-approval training. We’ll ask you attend this during your assessment, and the session a really useful introduction. Running over three days, it covers key subjects and gives you the chance to speak with current foster parents.
Mandatory training. Once you’re approved, you’ll need to undergo training in all the core fostering issues. While these include topics such as legislation, safeguarding and first-aid there are plenty of courses around child behaviour and psychology too – so it’s a great grounding for the future. They’ll build up our knowledge and help make you a more understanding and effective foster parent.
Specialist training. We run a comprehensive programme of training covering a huge range of specialist subjects, including the impact of country lines and foetal alcohol syndrome. As well as courses designed to develop your skills as a foster parent, such as Parent and Child training. These will help to broaden your understanding of the needs of foster children.
Cultural-specific training and support groups. As a specialist multi-cultural fostering agency, we’ve developed our training to help our foster parents become more aware of different cultures and faiths.
Online training.
To make it easier to combine training and family life we’ve developed a number of online courses to do at home. We’re adding to this all the time. Our online training is also really helpful if you have a partner that fosters with you that works outside the home. Although they will need to attend face to face training on occasions, our foster parents tell us that our online course makes life easier.
