2007 conference
Fostering Links in Scotland: developing a national consensus for foster care
Workshop 8
Facilitators: Bryan Ritchie, Director for Scotland, and Sarah Crangle, Fostering Links project worker
About this workshop
This workshop will explore the concept of developing a ‘national consensus’ in Scotland in terms of developing our foster care service. The workshop will allow participants an opportunity to hear about the work of the Fostering Links Project. This project has worked over the last three years with the major stakeholders in fostering including children in foster care, foster carers, and practitioners, from every agency in the country. Thus we have established a broad consensus about what needs to be done and who needs to do it, in order to ensure improvements for children, and foster carers.
Each participant has fed back developments ‘to’ their own agency, and to the project ‘from’ each agency. We have generated a national debate and ‘consciousness’ about the service with every foster carer in Scotland involved in one way or another. This has not only empowered carers and children, but has allowed carers and children a national platform in order to articulate their views.
Our National Government has seen this as a uniquely efficient, and effective way of communicating with the service and has welcomed this development, using it to check out their proposals for a new national strategy for foster care based to a large extent on the suggestions emerging from the views and suggested improvements made by carers and children and captured by the project.
The workshop will describe how to establish a system for bringing together carers, children in foster care, and practitioners. How to get them engaged, and how to capture their unique knowledge resulting in a major change in governmental attitude to the foster care service, including a recognition that there needs to be a prolonged investment in the service.
The Fostering Links Project is funded to ensure communication between all the relevant stakeholders including the sharing of best practice, and the reduction of felt isolation by carers.
Who should attend
This workshop is for foster carers and fostering services.
- Workshop 1: Mentoring : Foster carers supporting other foster carers
- Workshop 2: Pay for foster carers : the wider implications
- Workshop 3: Acclimatising to the heat in the kitchen!
- Workshop 4: Understanding and implementing the CWDC Training, Support and Development Standards for foster care
- Workshop 5: Parent and child placements
- Workshop 6: Attracting and keeping the foster carers you need
- Workshop 7: Involving young people in service delivery
- Workshop 8: Fostering Links in Scotland: developing a national consensus for foster care
- Workshop 9: Fostering emotional resilience with looked-after children : a model of working together
- Workshop 10: Tax, national insurance and state pensions : understanding the issues, solving the problems
- Workshop 11: The symbolic significance of food in the treatment, care and recovery of emotionally damaged children
- Workshop 12: Fostering achievement : Improving educational outcomes