Claire’s fostering journey

We’ve been fostering now for just over four years, so still fairly new. We thought about fostering for a long time because I was a primary school teacher and someone I taught in my second class was being fostered. She wrote me a letter and said, “Would you adopt me? I really like you, miss”. I thought, “Oh gosh, I would love to!”. She was lovely and then that put the thought in my mind, that it would be lovely to foster or adopt in the future.

My husband did some work in orphanages in Africa and some of the kids don’t have parents to look after them for whatever reason, and we want to help. So, when we married, we knew that we were going to foster or adopt. We had two of our own kids and then looked into it. We realised we couldn’t adopt until our youngest was five, which felt so long away. So, we were like, let’s get into fostering and see how we go. We went on a recruitment evening where unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people (UASC) were talking, and my husband said, “I think we should do this”. I was quite nervous about it, but we had lots of training which gave us lots of information, so that was good. And then we thought, “We’ll give it a go”.

We’re both Christians, so I feel like that’s something God is putting in our minds and our hearts. Loving and looking after these kids is what he would want people to be doing, and so we’re doing that. That might sound weird to someone who doesn’t believe, but that’s kind of motivation as well. We want to love those kids who need it.

We foster unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people. We’ve fostered six now and two of them have moved out. One of them is now in supported housing and hoping to go to a flat soon. The other is lodging with a family, close to where he works as a plumber’s assistant. They are both very much still part of our family, which is the lovely thing about fostering UASC. It’s the fact that they’re part of your family and then they’re going to be independent. They came back at Christmas, and we text and chat all the time, we’ve still got that relationship. They think of us as Mum and Dad, and our kids as brother and sister. So that’s lovely and I think that’ll probably be the case with our other UASC children. We’re their family base in the UK.

We have one Staying Put now at home and three that we foster, then our own two children who are now six and eight. It’s great! You have some days where you know someone’s grumpy about something or being teenagers – they go up and down with their hormones. But we find having more of them dilutes it because someone might be having a grumpy day, but then the others might be fine and happy. And so, you just kind of ride it out and then in a few days, they’re back to being normal and vice versa. And when we’re on the same page it’s wonderful! Just a big crazy family and our birth kids really enjoy it. They think of them as older brothers and sisters. They definitely feel part of our team.

My husband is a teacher. I used to work as a teacher, so it’s been helpful coming from a teaching background, but I foster full-time now.

No, there’s not been conflict. We’ve fostered Muslim, Catholic and Buddhist children. Before we eat our meal, we want to thank God for something, but we kind of adapt it. We say, “Well, let’s all be thankful, and you can be thankful to your God”. It’s a good quality to be thankful, so we just go around and say something – you know about dinner, sunshine or whatever, that kind of works in a multifaith way, really. And then, when they first come to us, they usually have to stay with us all the time. If we go out, they have to go out with us and that can be a challenge with church. Because then they have to come to our church with us and they may not speak the language, so they might not understand. But they can come and listen, or we bring a tablet for them to watch a movie on.

I guess the assessment process felt quite long, that’s quite intense. There’s a lot of paperwork and we’ve both lived in lots of addresses. We’ve just both moved quite a lot – that’s life. So having to get all the addresses and all the references was unusual. When you’re waiting for a placement, waiting for someone to come and live in your home, that can be a real rollercoaster. I remember when we were first waiting, it felt like an age. We thought, “We’re ready”. But I can really appreciate that people take the time and think about getting the right match. You want safe people with our kids and, they’ve really thought about that, that we’ve got young children. Sometimes the waiting can feel like a long time and there’s a room with a bed and everything set up ready and there’s no one coming. But then they suddenly come. You receive a phone call, and they give you a brief outline of who the person is. It’s exciting to know who’s going to come next and who’s going to be in this room.

It’s nerve-racking really because you don’t know what trauma they’ve been through. Are they going to get up in the night and wander around the house or have nightmares and shout out? So, it’s kind of daunting, but we want to make them feel welcome and loved. And how to support them if they don’t speak the language. We had someone come to us and we used Google translate to translate things which was quite useful, but he couldn’t read or write in his own language. Some tools you can speak into, and it speaks back in a different language, but it didn’t do that in his particular language because I don’t think it’s very common. We couldn’t use anything! He couldn’t read or write anything in his language, so we just had to use pictures and act things out to try to work it out, which was a challenge. But then after a while he picked up English amazingly well and seeing my kids teaching him things was lovely. My son was teaching him how to read and write, teaching what letter sounds were as well as helping him with some maths.

Yes. I’ve got to know my Supervising Social Worker well now because she’s been consistent which is good. I think when you build up a good relationship and we’re just honest, then that’s really useful and they know you. They know that if you’ve not done your paperwork one week or your diary stuff, then it’s going to come because you normally do. So, that works well. We’ve only had two different child Social Workers – the first one we had, we wanted to stick with her because she’s so brilliant and that relationship has been great. And again, her knowing us well and we know her.

We’ve also had the support in our UASC support group and that has been brilliant. We’re in a WhatsApp group with other UASC carers and that has been fantastic. That’s been a great support because at any moment you can just ask a question and people will reply and let you know and support you. So that was good at drawing on their wealth of knowledge as peer-to-peer support.

We had bespoke training at home. It was amazing because we had to really get up to speed with what it meant to be an unaccompanied asylum-seeking young person and what they go through. That was a really crucial piece of training. I also attended the annual Fostering Service Day, and they did a little bit on Therapeutic Parenting with PACE which is great. I’m really excited about it. I came back and I raved about it to people. I’m training to put it into practice, but I would like to know and do more training on that. The Secure Base Training was useful as well.

Yes, bits. I’m trying to get on some more training, as these young people have trauma coming over here and the horrible things that have probably happened to them on their journey here. It’s a bit strange as you don’t know what they’ve gone through, and they may not want to share that with you. So, even now, I know some of it, but we don’t really know the full story behind their journey. It’s also about supporting them through their asylum process as well. That’s difficult. Not knowing what their future holds and where they’re going to live. And that could be really uncertain for them.

I think seeing the change in our young people. Our first one, he’s still living with us now actually, but he came in and was lost, with no hope for the future and thinking everything’s going to be bad. And not knowing English very well, to then getting GCSEs and is now hoping to complete an apprenticeship. He’s a 19-year-old man who’s got lots of great values, he’s learnt English and is doing really well in the world. That’s been brilliant to see and watch his journey. It’s just amazing!

We had another boy come to us, the one who I said didn’t speak and couldn’t read or write in his own language. He had never been to school and couldn’t say anything in English. He’s been with us a year in October and he’s now doing GCSEs in English! He’s getting good grades, especially in Physics and Biology, where he’s around a grade 5, having not even being in school for a whole year yet! He didn’t know any English, didn’t know his numbers past 20 and couldn’t fill in a 100-square. But he’s going to get up to a grade 4 in GCSE English and maths. The progress and those kinds of moments are amazing.

My birth children are six and eight but seeing them grow in confidence as they’re around teenagers – they stand up for themselves. They’re accepted and valued by all these teenagers, and they’ve got bigger brothers and sisters to play with them.

I mean, there’s the usual teenager kind of boundary pushing that can be a challenge. I suppose finding time with my husband in the evenings. We try to make that happen or get safe people in to babysit, and we go out and have a meal together. I think the challenge is at the beginning, some of them are on safety plans, so it’s quite intense at first when they first arrive because they’re not in school or college. You’ve got to get them to go to school and college, and they come without anything usually. So, you’ll have to go out and buy all their clothes and shoes, but as they don’t speak much English that can be a challenge.

Until we retire – I think that’s our plan! Or maybe when our children get to teenagers. I’m not sure how they’ll feel about other teenagers coming in. They might find it funny having teenage boys come in, so it might be that we foster younger children or do something different for a while. But we love what we’re doing, we want our family to grow and grow and it’s just great. We definitely want to keep going with it! We’ve been maxing out our house bit by bit – we put in planning permission to try to extend into our roof, so we can create more bedrooms.

To think about the age of the children that you’d want to care for. If you have your own children, think about their needs. If you don’t have children, in terms of work, see how it would impact your life because it will impact everything really. Think about how you can problem-solve and consider the support network you have around you. But my overall advice is to go for it because it’s great! Don’t be worried about it. It’s going to be a bit messy and chaotic, but you haven’t got to be perfect. We’re always learning.