04/02/2026
£88,000,000 is to be spent on solving the great foster care shortage. Really?
I’ve no doubt this £88,000,000 will be spent on sparkly recruitment campaigns promising a rewarding career- if only you have a spare room and ‘enough love’. Maybe the recruitment of marketing companies and extra staff without the correct training?
Well it would cost quite a lot less than that to train all Social Workers (including front line), in trauma informed practice, and fully and honestly prepare Foster Parents to care for traumatised children.
And while we’re at it, why not train the judiciary in the catastrophic effects of continuing abusive contact when the child is finally in a safe home. How destabilising is that? 
Then we would dramatically reduce levels of breakdowns and unplanned endings, (‘placement disruption’), and retain professional therapeutic foster parents with years of essential experience. (Like we already do in our fostering teams within The Centre of Excellence in Child Trauma).
Oh and while we are at it how about private health care for the whole family as a bare minimum?
Fostering families don’t leave because they want more money. They leave because when things get difficult they are unsupported, judged, blamed and alone. We did the research with Bristol University in 2016. We know how compassion fatigue debilitates the entire sector. And yet these findings are often still ignored and the tendency remains to act too late, offer too little, withdraw and blame. 
It really isn’t rocket science.
And here we still are, continuing to offer free trauma informed training for Social Workers, real life respect and partnership working with our fostering families AND the Therapeutic Fostering Assessment, which solves so many of these problems.
Www.coect.co.uk
