What People Think Fostering Is

When most people picture fostering, they imagine compassion and heart. They want to be reassured that society’s vulnerable children are taken in, cherished, and loved. And there is truth in that, fostering can be one of the most fulfilling roles in life. But let’s be clear: fostering requires more than just “a spare room and an open heart.” It’s a skilled profession disguised as an act of kindness, one that demands you become part parent, part advocate, part therapist, operating 24/7 without an off switch. When children arrive at your door with their belongings in bin bags, they’re carrying far more than clothes. They bring the full weight of their experiences, disrupted attachments, educational gaps, medical needs, and behavioural challenges that would test trained professionals.

My job? To unpack both the physical bags and the emotional ones, creating stability where there’s been chaos, routine where there’s been unpredictability. You’re not just providing shelter, you’re rebuilding trust and structure, one school run and bedtime story at a time. Working alongside overstretched social workers, you become a detective of sorts, piecing together fragmented histories while advocating for children who’ve learned not to expect much from adults. It’s simultaneously the hardest and most necessary job imaginable.

But what gets buried beneath the heroic narrative is a crucial truth: fostering is skilled care work that demands proper recognition. This isn’t charity or volunteerism, it is professional expertise deployed at the sharp end of child welfare.

My Path into Fostering

I came to fostering after retiring from the NHS, where I had worked as a nurse. I had always wanted to foster but knew I couldn’t balance it with my demanding career. After retirement, I finally had the time, space, and transferable skills to dedicate myself to children with complex care needs. The fostering training was exhaustive, every detail of my life scrutinised. But for me, fostering was a continuation of my life’s work in caring and advocating for those who need support most.

My early placements changed how I viewed fostering. One child in particular transformed my understanding of care. They had severe disabilities and came initially for a long-term placement. But I quickly saw that their parents were exhausted, beaten down not by the child, but by the system supposed to help them. Drawing on my healthcare background, I monitored their care closely and stood alongside their parents at meetings. Together, we pushed back against unsuitable care plans. Eventually, they were reunited with their family. I continued to provide short breaks, and to this day, I am part of their extended family.

For me, this was proof of the best of fostering: not just taking children in, but sometimes helping strengthen family connections. But it also revealed the worst: parents and carers alike were routinely abandoned by the very structures meant to support them.

Emergency Placements and Permanent Care

Over my years of fostering, I have cared for dozens of children - some for short-term breaks, many in emergency situations, and others for longer stays. Each child arrived with their own story of trauma, yet each deserved safety, comfort, and dignity. Today, my current permanent child’s needs mean I can no longer take emergency placements. They cannot cope with constant changes or other children coming and going. This highlights how fostering is never static - our roles shift depending on the needs of children already in our care.

The reality for children in “permanent” placements is stark: they arrive with complex needs that often have been missed. Carers find themselves navigating months-long waiting lists for evaluations while managing behaviours and conditions they’re not equipped, or funded, to handle. When mainstream schools can’t meet these children’s needs, Local Authorities frequently insist on maintaining placements in the name of “integration”, even when it’s clear the provision is inadequate. The result? Children are struggling in environments that can’t support them, while carers watch their educational potential slip away.

The financial burden invariably shifts to foster families. 60% of foster carers have considered resigning, citing a lack of support from their fostering service and poor well-being. This creates a fundamental contradiction: Local Authorities maintain “overarching responsibility” for these children while systematically refusing the support requests that would help them thrive. Carers who advocate strongly for their children’s needs often find themselves labelled as difficult rather than dedicated.

We’re losing experienced carers faster than we can recruit new ones, creating a system that is perpetually in crisis. Those who remain are stretched beyond their intended role, serving as parents, advocates, educators, and financiers, often with minimal recognition or support.

Who Really Represents Foster Carers?

Here’s something most people don’t understand: our de facto employers choose who represents us. It’s like one football team choosing the referee. Most foster carers assume they have union backing through The Fostering Network (TFN). We’re automatically signed up, no alternatives are presented, and no choice is offered. The financial relationship reveals the problem: Local Authorities fund TFN directly, typically covering our membership fees. Most carers never see a bill, never question who’s calling the shots. But The Fostering Network is the UK’s leading fostering charity, not a trade union, and that distinction changes everything.

When your advocate’s funding comes from the very authorities you might need to challenge, whose corner are they really in? TFN provides valuable training and support, but they can’t play hardball on systemic issues when their income depends on keeping Local Authorities happy. Those helpful toolkits they produce? Look closer, they often help authorities manage carers more smoothly, not help carers push back. The result is a workforce watching from the sidelines, believing they have someone fighting their corner when actually they have a charity trying to keep both teams happy. In any other sector, workers would spot this conflict immediately. In foster care, we’ve normalised it.

Foster Carers: The Unrecognised Professionals

When we examine what foster carers actually do, the parallels with healthcare professionals become undeniable. We provide mental health care to traumatised children, manage complex care needs, coordinate teams, and maintain detailed records. We assess mental health needs, implement care plans, and provide crisis intervention, often with the same children that nurses and therapists struggle to support in institutions. We work with society’s most vulnerable people during critical moments, providing 24/7 care and making life-changing decisions under pressure. We write reports, liaise with specialists, and advocate within complex systems.

Yet here’s the absurdity: while we’re expected to attend some professional meetings, we’re often excluded from the most crucial ones. Multidisciplinary team meetings about “our” children frequently happen without us around the table, despite us knowing these children’s daily needs, triggers, and progress better than anyone. Decisions are made about the children in our care, and about us as carers, but our voices go unheard. Even when we seek union representation at meetings, we’re told foster carers don’t qualify. Social workers and healthcare professionals get union representation, but foster carers, caring for the same children, are denied this basic workplace protection.

Teachers have professional registration and union protection because society recognises their specialist skills. Healthcare workers have the same. Yet foster carers, who combine both skill sets while providing round-the-clock therapeutic parenting to the most damaged children, are denied professional status entirely.

Allegations and Injustice

Drawing on my background in staff representation, I now support foster carers through genuine union work. One of the ugliest truths? How the system treats carers when allegations surface. We’ve all heard the stereotypes: the Miss Hannigans who pocket cash while children suffer. There is a commonly held belief that foster carers are “in it for the money.” Let’s be clear: at below minimum wage, nobody’s getting rich fostering.

When genuine safeguarding concerns arise, they absolutely must be investigated. But here’s what the public doesn’t see: allegations have become routine weapons in foster care. They come from all directions, distressed children lashing out, birth families seeking leverage, even disagreements over pocket money escalating into formal complaints. When they land, carers are instantly suspended, presumed guilty, their reputations shredded before any investigation begins. These processes drag on for months, sometimes years, while families live in limbo and children lose stable placements.

Even when carers are completely exonerated, the damage lingers. The “no smoke without fire” mentality means cleared carers operate under permanent suspicion. Here’s the perverse irony: the very people holding the system together can be destroyed by a single unfounded claim. While safeguarding children must remain paramount, the current approach treats dedicated carers as disposable, guilty until proven innocent, and tainted even when cleared.

The exploitation runs deep. We prop up the care system but are treated as disposable “gig economy” workers. We have no contracts, no sick pay, no pensions, and no minimum wage protection. Local Authorities rely on us completely, yet accept no duty of care to us in return. Private fostering agencies openly profit from public need. Local Authorities often pay agencies double or triple the allowance carers receive. The gap becomes profit - millions channelled to shareholders while foster families struggle to cover real costs, sometimes subsidising placements from personal savings.

This is textbook wealth extraction. Local Authorities, strapped for cash, pay private agencies double or triple what carers receive. Independent fostering agency placements consistently cost more than twice as much as in-house, local authority provision, at an average of £48,000 per year. From what I can see, this is a moral failure. We’ve created a system where vulnerable children generate wealth for investors while those actually caring for them can’t afford heating bills.

The Good: Why We Keep Going

For all the frustration and exploitation, fostering creates moments that redefine what matters. Watching a child who arrived terrified of water win their first swimming badge. Cheering from the audience as they collect a school award they never thought possible. Teaching someone to ride a bike because no one ever had the time before.

But here’s what the “you shouldn’t be in it for the money” brigade misses: professional excellence requires professional conditions. When carers face financial stress and a fundamental lack of support, children suffer. When experienced carers leave because they can’t afford to stay, relationships that took years to build are severed overnight.

Young people learning to trust deserve support from adults who can access training, respite, and resources without depleting savings. Those swimming lessons, music classes, school trips, they’re not luxuries, they’re lifelines. The “pure altruism” narrative serves only those profiting from the current system. It’s weaponised sentimentality that keeps skilled professionals accepting poverty wages while private equity extracts millions.

We wouldn’t expect teachers or nurses to work for love alone; why do we demand it from those raising society’s most vulnerable children? Recognition goes beyond finances. It’s about being treated as the professionals we are, not glorified babysitters. Social services demand we become co-parents, therapists, advocates, and then exclude us from crucial decisions about the children in our care.

The Real Union Alternative

My family members going back generations have been healthcare workers and union members. So from being a nurse and becoming a foster carer, I couldn’t believe we didn’t have a union. About 10 years ago a friend told me they were starting up a fostering union. I thought it might be in UNISON, but it was with the Independent Workers’ union of Great Britain (IWGB). I remember thinking it was a completely different type of union, young, small and quite radical, but I really liked it, and I knew we desperately needed it.

The IWGB Foster Care Workers Branch is a genuine trade union - grassroots, democratic, and resourced by carers directly. It fights for higher pay, transparent processes for allegations, better working conditions, and professional recognition. It’s the only body that truly exists to defend us collectively, not serve Local Authorities.

What foster carers need is recognition as skilled professionals. Our union’s demands are clear:

• Limb (b) worker status, giving us the same employment rights as healthcare workers and teachers
• Professional registration and training, with ongoing development like nurses and social workers
• An independent regulatory body, equivalent to nursing or teaching councils
• Professional pay scales, reflecting our specialist skills rather than treating us as unskilled labour
• Union representation rights, including attendance at multidisciplinary meetings about our children

Just as we wouldn’t expect nurses to work without contracts or professional development, foster carers deserve the same basic standards.

The union mostly spreads by word of mouth and social media, so I spend a lot of time on local fostering Facebook groups. I started posting about the union there, and I have faced a lot of resistance from other carers. Despite this, the admins did a poll to see if members wanted to allow me to post about the union, and it was an overwhelmingly positive response. From there, I started organising local meetings, starting with just twenty other carers. We hold these meetings very locally, with the carers who live closest to us, and I often host them in my own house. These meetings have a training element, with members wanting to learn how to stand up to social workers and advocate for themselves and the children.

Organising foster carers is uniquely hard. We’re spread across 55,000 households with no common workplace. Many don’t see themselves as workers. Others fear reprisal if they speak up. Organising with foster carers is very different from organising with nurses, as I used to do. They don’t like confrontation and live in fear of Local Authorities stopping their placements. But through the IWGB, networks are forming. Carers are winning battles locally across the UK and discovering strength in shared struggle: in Northumberland, Falkirk, Glasgow, North Yorkshire, and many more places. In Glasgow, carers have won a 10% increase in the children allowance. The more of us who stand together, the less precarious and isolated we become.

Changing the Future of Care

Fostering is one of the most meaningful roles anyone can take on. Over the years, I have welcomed dozens of children into my home, each one deserving stability, dignity, and love. But would I recommend fostering today? Not without a heavy heart. The system limps along only because carers sacrifice their health, finances, and futures to keep it functioning. They simply can’t recruit younger foster carers anymore, and the workforce is dwindling. Foster carers would usually be recruited by word of mouth, but no foster carer could in good conscience recruit a friend or family member today. We’ve built children’s safety on the foundations of exploitation.

They say it takes a village to raise a child, but many don’t want to be a villager anymore, just tourists dropping by when convenient. Social workers rotate through cases. Judges make decisions without meeting the children. Therapists offer three-week interventions for six-year traumas. Foster carers? We’re the only permanent residents in these children’s villages. We’re there for the 3 am nightmares, the school exclusions, the contact visit meltdowns. We don’t get to clock out when things get difficult or transfer cases when we’re overwhelmed.

This must change, not through more empty rhetoric about “valued partners” but through concrete reform, employment rights, professional recognition, and genuine support systems. Because when we inevitably burn out or give up, it’s not careers that end, it’s childhoods that shatter. The true measure of a society isn’t its good intentions but how it treats those who care for its most vulnerable. Right now, we’re failing that test. And every child in care is paying the price.