Matching young people with the right family

03 December 2019

By: Team Fostering

Once you're approved as a foster carer at Team Fostering, you'll be allocated a dedicated Supervising Social Worker (SSW) who will be there to guide and support you throughout your journey.

Your SSW will be based at your local office, and you can expect to get to know each other well, seeing them at your supervisory visits, group sessions and as your advocate in a range of meetings and discussions.

As well as your SSW, you will meet and get to know a variety of agency staff including our hardworking Placements Teams, who will be in touch to arrange a meeting with you shortly after your approval. They will also be based locally and will spend time learning about you and your family, your household and background. This helps to build a solid and familiar understanding of you that will allow us to match you with children and young people whose needs align with your skills.

We take matching very seriously, as part of our mission to put children's futures first, and we commit to only making a match recommendation if we truly believe that the child/ren will be an appropriate fit with your family, based on what we know about them from local authorities and previous awareness. We refer back to your Form F throughout matching to further assure a strong match is likely to take place. We want our foster carers to be confident that our matching process considers all information available, and we offer carers the right to decline a proposed match if they, for any reason, do not agree that this is an appropriate pairing.

Children and young people that are referred to the agency have a variety of backgrounds, beliefs, experiences, personalities and understanding. There is no 'typical child' and for this reason we endeavour to recruit a diverse range of fostering families, with aims to strengthen the chance that we can find the right home for children referred to us. There are countless myths of factors that prevent you from fostering, but many of these are in fact that... myths! If you've been thinking about fostering, check out our eligibility criteria by clicking here.

Our Placements Teams are responsible for matching children with families, arranging any moves between carers and co-ordinating children leaving foster homes, but also for processing carer payments and expenses, co-ordinating short break care and promoting carers' skills and availability to local authorities.

Team Fostering is an independent, not-for-profit fostering agency that operates across the North East, Yorkshire and East Midlands. To learn more about fostering with Team Fostering, you can speak to us by: