Being local | Team Fostering

29 September 2019

By: Team Fostering

"If I foster I will be working in my own home, so why does it matter how local my agency is?"

At Team Fostering we view the fact that we have local offices as something hugely beneficial for our foster carers, children and young people. Running offices across the North of England to support local foster carers is something that we’re proud of and something that we will continue to do.

Foster carers carry out their role in their own home, so why is it so important to offer local offices?

At Team Fostering we believe that it’s crucial to be near our carers for several reasons:

It opens the door to further training opportunities. The closer we are, the easier it is for foster carers to fit in training and development opportunities around the likes of school runs. At Team Fostering we offer a huge variety of training courses, facilitated by both internal specialists and external trainers, and all our offices host some of these.
Local offices mean local people, that truly know our foster carers. Having a local support team ensures that, as a foster carer, if your own social worker is unavailable there will be a duty worker to speak with who you will likely have met and who understand you and your family.
Less time on the road! As a foster carer you’ll need to travel to your nearest office for things like Panel, training, supervisions for any support groups or events you’d like to attend. When setting up each of our offices, their locations were handpicked to ensure convenient links to major roads and in a place that makes travel easier for each of our foster carers. In times when offices have expanded we have taken time to speak with our teams to ensure that we continue to operate from accessible and appropriate premises.
A local hub of foster carers. When we speak to our foster carers about the support at Team Fostering, they often discuss the significance of fellow carers and how valuable this is to them. Having a number of smaller and localised offices rather than fewer, larger-spanning buildings means that small groups of nearby carers are formed, with many of our carers having their own social media groups, group chats and informal meet-ups.

Team Fostering has offices across Leeds, North Tyneside, Sheffield, Middlesbrough and South Normanton, currently recruiting and training foster carers across the North East, Yorkshire and East Midlands.

If you're interested in learning more about fostering and the foster carer pay, support and training you'd receive, contact us by: