Foster Placement Stability

2551 Words11 Pages
Introduction Foster placement stability is something that concerns and involves everybody working with Children in Care, and in particular Fostering Services in which I have worked for the past 9 years. My aim is to identify risk factors for placement breakdowns and to share the knowledge with my colleagues in the Foster Team so we hopefully better can support the foster carers and meet the needs of children placed with them by reducing placement breakdowns. The Care Matters Ministerial Stocktake Report 2009, reports that some improvements in regards to placement stability have been made since the Care Matters White Paper was released in 2007, which emphasised one of the main needs to be a strong focus on stability of placements. Standard 8 of The National Minimum Standards of Fostering also place a duty on Local Authority Fostering Services to ”…ensure each child or young person placed in foster care is carefully matched with a carer capable of meeting her/his assessed needs.” Page 12 Local Authorities measure placement stability via Performance Indicators which mainly is interpreted in forms of statistics. I felt that focus in my work place is therefore more about number crunching than trying to find out how we better can improve placement stability. The critical reviews of the articles are followed by the main findings from the articles which are presented in three categories; child’s characteristics, foster family characteristics and services involved. This paper ends with a conclusion to discuss how these findings can be used in practice and with some further research suggestions. The articles identified in the literature search were sourced via internet searches on Staffordshire University Library web search, Swetwise, ScienceDirect and Google Scholar, using the keywords: placement breakdown and placement stability. Due to time and
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