The Skills to Foster
Pre-approval training
Preparing applicants for fostering is essential. The Fostering Network produces comprehensive training materials which ensure that applicants have the knowledge and confidence to greet their fist foster care placement.
The training course
The course focuses on practical day-to-day skills and is linked throughout to the UK National Standards for Foster Care and the competency-based assessment process.
The programme is divided into seven sessions:
- What do foster carers do?
- who are the children and young people?
- Working together
- Safer caring
- Understanding behaviour
- Moving on
- Sons and daughters - what's fostering going to mean to me?
This session is for children in the applicant's home and is specifically designed to explain what foster care is and what it will mean for them.
The Fostering Network also offers a Training the trainers course to enable you to deliver The Skills to Foster. For more information contact our training department.
We recommend The Skills to Foster course as the most comprehensive and up to date pre approval training course for foster carers.
We are currently planning an update, which will directly link to the CWDC's Training, Support and Development Standards for Foster Care. However the Fostering Network was part of the steering group for the standards, so what they state is very much in agreement with what we think and have been saying for some time, and therefore are in line with the existing course.
We expect an updated version of The Skills to Foster to be launched in spring 2009, but it remains a perfectly functioning tool which we envisage working well with the standards.
We will give fostering services plenty of notice of the publication date for the updated edition, to enable them to plan their purchasing accordingly.