What Does It Take To Be A Foster Carer? (Your Radical Questions with Louise Allen)

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau. Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions. This is where I put your questions to one of our brilliant radical guests.

0:48It's basically a chance to really, really engage directly with them. They are always super smart, super interesting, super radical. And we want you to have the chance to really connect with them. I have just finished a very, very, very moving, powerful, important and enlightening conversation about foster care with the author and the foster care at Louise Allen. She's also stuck around to answer some of your questions, which is very generous, given the demands on your time, Louise, and the fact you've come in all the way from Bristol to be here. Are you good to answer some questions? Yeah, go for it.

1:20Feeling radical? Yeah, always. Here we go. This is our first question. It's from a friend of the Today programme. It's the founder or one of the founders of Messy Fostering, Amy Burns. Here she is. Hello. My question for Louise is how has your time in care shaped the way you foster today? And in your experience, what are the most challenging and the most rewarding aspects of being a foster carer? Oh, that's a good question, isn't it? Most challenging and most rewarding. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, my own experience of growing up in the care system directly informs the work I do. mostly by me taking a breath before I do anything I think that the times are different but what I remember and what is important is that we are working with children who are trying to make sense of their world that come from different cultures and different households and my biggest I think biggest gift to myself when I'm working in them is just to go slow go slow learn your child and not take anything personally that's that one what would you say she said what are the biggest challenges and what do you find most challenging which find most rewarding right what I find most challenging is uh the system that uh I have to navigate um and what I find most rewarding are the simple little quiet winds um it might and that's always around the children i actually don't find the children challenging i find the children magical they are little universes that pop into our world and it's a it's amazing to to watch them unfold and learn how they are and learn their stories because once you learn their stories you can help um so they're not the challenge the challenge is trying to make it all happen in a system which is feeling pretty crumbly.

3:14I think Amy Burns would understand that. I should say that she is one of the co-founders of Messy Fostering. They are a group who were guest editors of the Today programme in August 2023. And I know that their brilliant, brilliant guest edit of the Today programme influenced the legislation that's coming through later in this month, which is, I think, something of the power of journalism and of the Today programme. Right, we had loads of questions for you, Louise, but most of them actually have come in as written ones. So in fact, you can take your headphones off if you want. I'm going to read this out to you.

3:43So thank you, by the way, to Amy, and best of luck with all that you're doing for Messy Fostering. Thank you for being such a great friend of the Today programme and indeed of Radical. This is a question that came in, Louise, from Andy. Andy, thank you. He emailed us. The email address is radical at bbc.co.uk, and he said, my wife and I have been kinship foster carers with permanency for the past six years. Our foster daughter is fully part of our family alongside our two birth children. She came to us aged nine, carrying significant trauma from her early life. It's been an incredibly challenging journey, learning therapeutic parenting, navigating daily struggles, and she's growing up into an amazing young woman.

4:20But those early experiences still shape her world every day. I should tell you, Andy, that Louise Allen is nodding vigorously as I read this out. Andy goes on, despite the challenges, it has been one of the greatest honours of our lives to love her. advocate for her and commit to her long term into adulthood and beyond. If I'm being honest, the moments we've come closest to giving up were never because of her, but because of the system around her. My question for Louise Allen is this. What radical systemic changes does she believe are most urgently needed to ensure looked after children and the families who commit to them are genuinely supported so those children have the best possible chance to live healthy, fulfilled lives and contribute positively to society?

5:01That's an excellent question. And I think if the changes, the transformation happens in a way that I think and I hope it does, it means that the money that is allocated for children in care is shifted and redirected to the children. Shifted from the privatisation of residential, you know, the money that goes into residential homes and a lot of the private sector. Saying that there's a, you know, if you stop the private sector, it'd crash overnight. that you put the money where the children are. And I think what has happened in the last, I don't know how many years, is that when we talked, we don't really mention the children.

5:41And what I have done repeatedly is bring the children back into the front and centre of the conversation. It sounds like, Andy, you're doing incredible work. I relate to everything you said, but until the money is there, we can't keep doing, you know, We can't keep sticky plasters on things and we can't keep hoping on heroes and virtue and all the stuff that she doesn't do much good. What we do need is properly educated foster carers, education before training. That is essential. We need social workers that are confident and that can work with us. And we need help in the home. And I'm sure that a lot of the frustrations that you have felt raising your young person is the fact that kinship care is essential.

6:29It should be one of the first things we look at when the child is going into care. And those kinship carers need financial support as well. I should just forgive you for interrupting, Louise. Kinship foster care is when a family member or friend becomes a child's approved foster carer. It's sometimes called family and friends foster care or connected person foster care. you've still got to be assessed and approved as a foster carer. The child is in the care of the children's services who share parental responsibility with the child's parents. Unlike other types of kinship care, you will receive a regular foster care allowance.

7:03What about this idea? Because Andy's after Radical Ideas. What about this idea, which I know they've looked at and the government work, which is coming out later this month, looked at about extending homes, basically kind of, you know, whether it's a new room or an extension to the house. because I know you've looked at it as well, Louise. Yeah, again, you know, we welcome all ideas and, you know, it's a building block, isn't it? Forgive the pun. But immediately when I read that, I just thought, well, you know, only certain houses can have extensions. If you are in a rented house, you can't. And, you know, again, we need to broaden out our range of foster carers.

7:45So by doing that, we're saying, OK, OK, so you'd have to be a foster carer in a home that is likely for you to get permission to have an extension. Why you have an extension is that to take sibling groups or to have more children. What the numbers on the children coming into that home, because most foster carers, we're approved for three children. Not all of us have three children because not many people have three spare rooms. so if you get more than three children are you by the back door turning someone's home into a into a cheap residential home was my first reaction and you talked in our main episode which came out last thursday about the potential for abuse of that system just to be clear to people the idea which i think the government is looking at trialing across england i'm not sure that it applies in scotland yet is this idea that basically foster parents will be able to have this extension conversion or refurbishment funded by the state on top of their routine payments and the idea is that it's more efficient if it costs even you know 12 000 pounds it might cost a lot more than if it costs 30 000 pounds that 30 000 pounds is still maybe a tenth of what it costs to have that child in a residential care home so fostering is a smart economic investment as well as a moral yeah absolutely and again it's down to you know before the trouble is that you know i think i'm long enough in the tooth to see so many really good projects just sort of die um quietly and what would be a shame is if the matching for children um was down instead of matching the the relational dynamic came down to a room okay so one of the um we had lots and lots of questions thank you for that andy penny on instagram sent me this comment when i said you were coming on the podcast louise she said well it's not a question but i think there are issues which which we ought to discuss thank you penny for sending me this comment it says as an adoptive mother and mindset coach to adoptive parents i'm so thankful to the incredible work of foster carers our son had wonderful foster carers who loved him as their own child i am forever grateful to them i think foster carers often know the children and their needs more than some social workers so i would like to see their voices heard more when decisions sometimes very wrong ones are made about the child better recognition including decent pay should be considered are foster carers consulted louise um about a child's needs when social workers are making decisions not always no how's that work it it's it doesn't work enough um what happens is that the foster carers doesn't matter who you are what your background you are a foster carer that's it you are in that little cardigan box and then when you do know your children better than anyone you do and when you're living with them and you go through their trauma with them and you're you're by their side and you are you are in their lives and then you'll get decisions made about those children by people who have never even met the child that's a different the problem is that that that has has because of the the way our corporate parent operates the decision making has become so far from the front line it has it is so distant and they're making decisions based on financial outcomes and they say it's in the best interest of the child but you'd have to know that child to make the best interest and i'm so grateful that question came in because you can the foster carers are have to be perceived as a as a professional along everyone aside everyone else we hold information and it is the value that they put on our information which is isn't great at the moment which is why you know you as a foster carer what i keep fighting for is you know that we receive recognition for what we do we have we have protection for what we do we have we can do our work in the ease and the comfort that we're not going to go broke and they were not always going to receive allegations but we hold the key information around the child i get called into into meetings now where i'm asked to leave at a certain point because obviously i'm not grown up enough or clever enough or can be trusted enough to hear the other bits of information which is frustrating and it's hugely insulting and demeaning it's insulting to my child as well you know I know them Penny thank you so much for that question this we had lots of questions this one's come in from Helen we'll make this a final question just for the sake of time should we be thinking thank you for this Helen thanks for sending it in should we be thinking about how we change the model of social care to make it easier for friends and family to become carers when things don't work is Helen's question there about where yeah someone's been fostered and it's not been a good situation, but you want to kind of change the regulation so it's easy for that foster child to move towards a kinship arrangement.

12:45I think, sorry, I don't want to misrepresent you, Helen. I just want to get to the core of your question. Normally when the child comes into care, when they've been through child protection, it's gone through the courts and there is a section 20, which is a voluntary care order so that the parent voluntarily gives up 50 % of the care of the child to the corporate parent. if the corporate parent is particularly worried they take a greater percentage so they hold most of the corporate parent decisions What's corporate parent mean? Corporate parent is estate parenting so that's the social care system that's the courts have decided that a child needs to go into care that's when the corporate parent which is the social services children's social care becomes the corporate parent Right, okay So it's a bureaucratic parent And what's the issue with the system at the moment that you think needs to change.

13:36So when it comes to Helen saying, should we make it easier for friends and family to become carers when things don't work? Depends who the friends and carers are, isn't it? So I think when a child is at the most vulnerable and the reason, you know, it's quite hard getting a child into care. And I think people need, you know, still don't understand that. It's really difficult to evidence why a child needs to go into care. And most judges will scrutinise the hell out of anything because they need to know that paperwork. The evidence is honest, is true, is there's enough of it. And that involves the multi-agency.

14:14So it's the school, the doctors, you know, it's not just because someone says I don't like them and they're horrible people. It's a lot of work. So when they are in that position, I think one of the first things that social workers investigate is kinship care. Who in the family ecosystem, who could look after this child? Now, there might be grandparents, there might be sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, but they should be under as much scrutiny as I am as a foster carer because you do not want to put the child back at risk. So if they are deemed to be a good, safe space, a pair of hands for the child to be with, then kinship should go ahead.

14:59and it should get the same finance and support as a foster carer. Okay. I'm going to shamelessly abuse my proximity to this mic to ask you a final brief question prompted by everything that you've said, which has been riveting over the main episode and these are your radical questions. If people have listened to these two episodes because maybe they follow you or alerts of fostering because they're thinking about fostering, and I reckon that it's highly probable that there are going to be people listening to this who are thinking actively right now about entering the process what's your advice to them uh god that's the longest pause that we've yeah yeah because in one part of my brain i'm thinking well as it's that question's before i've you know that's got the heat going the other part of me is you you should talk to foster carers but i know that so many are leaving and they are our greatest these advocates, you see where I'm going with this?

15:56And then I think I could say what we need. I could tell you who I think we definitely need not to be foster carers. And there's a process of elimination. This is another way around of it. Before you even do foster care, because there is an element of, oh it'd be really lovely and you're back in the dreams again is if you are somebody who needs reward recognition and gratification for motivation don't do it do not do it because you're not going to get any of that you get people who will look at you in the face and swear at you kick you tell you've ruined their lives i know it sounds like your average teenager but this is how this is what you'll get you're not going to get the gratitude you get the gratitude is those small moments those small moments when you know we talk about holding cutlery that is the gratitude and that will mean more than anything to you we don't need people who are rescuers we don't need people who who are who need to do this for virtue signaling we don't need people who are saviors or saints and we don't need people who feel that they're being heroic.

17:18We need regular people who have got, you know, got sort of thoughts, got things going on, but their heart, their heart, the heart of a lion is what you need. You need inner strength and you need compassion and empathy because if you think empathy is enough, you're wrong. you need empathy balance strongly with compassion that will keep you rooted and grounded to keep children stable those placements stable if a placement breaks down that's another £55 ,000 you know the best thing we can do it makes business sense, moral sense emotional sense is get good foster carers who are educated not three day skills to foster off you gay but properly educated and willing and keen to keep developing and in it for the right reasons and in it for the right reasons and they should be paid yeah you know we got to stop this virtue oh you know it's my calling it says no it's not it you need to pay yourself you got to pay for the groceries exactly yeah well if you're going to get a cleaner though that's one of your right give us a cleaner you know and then give us give To walk into a foster home and smell cleaning products when you are up against it will be heaven.

18:43But you want the freedom to raise children. You want the freedom to think how you're going to raise the children. Exactly. I'm so glad I asked that. Not only because what you said was a revelation, but like so much of what you said went in exactly the opposite direction. Because I said, what's your advice to people who are thinking about becoming foster girls? You said, these are the people you don't need. And it's absolutely riveting. thank you so much Helen for that question I hope we got to it in our response and I hope what I asked at the end there also illuminated the answers you were after Louise thank you so much it's been such a revelation I'm going to go you mentioned in our main episode this picture of you as a 15 year old who ran to Portsmouth and you're staring at the Isle of Wight with big hair and I'm going to check it out on your website I want that on the front of your next edition of your memoir it's an amazing experience meeting you so thank you so much for coming in thank you for inviting me and thank you so much in the let's get more people fostering the right people well i can tell you the people in government are going to be listening to you because they listen to this podcast particularly closely and especially this episode i'll be back next thursday when i shall be exploring how to save the music industry the future of music with no less than the head of the grammy awards it's going to be fantastic talk to you soon bye

20:07If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft turns out to be flawed? In 1999, four apartment buildings were blown up in Russia, hundreds killed. But 25 years on, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. Because these bombs, they're part of the origin story of one of the most powerful men in the world. Vladimir Putin. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss first time round? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

20:56If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.