ADOPTION POLICY REVIEW GROUP: CHOICES FOR CHILDREN IN FOSTERING AND ADOPTION
Chapter 12. Private Fostering
Private fostering is dealt with in the 1984 Act and the 1985 Regulations. It is completely separate from the 'public' fostering service carried out by and on behalf of local authorities. Public fostering is covered in Chapter 8 above.
Private fostering is where a parent makes an arrangement with someone who is not a close relative, to care for her/his child. That is a 'private' arrangement. Basically, if the child is to stay with the other person for more than 28 days at a time, then there are duties on the parent and the carer under the 1984 Act, to notify the local authority of the arrangement. The authority then has a duty to check that the arrangements and carers are satisfactory. This can be described as having a monitoring or 'inspectorial' duty, because the task is different from the full assessment that is made of public foster carers, although some of the checks are similar. The child is not the responsibility of the authority and is not 'looked after', but the authority retain a monitoring role until the child returns to live with the parent. The way in which the duty is carried out in practice varies from authority to authority.
There is almost certainly a great deal of private fostering which is not known to authorities, where arrangements are either deliberately not notified or where families and carers have no knowledge of their duty to inform authorities. There is very little public awareness of this legislation and local authority workers themselves are often unsure of its scope. The Guidance, Vol. 2, offers no assistance, because it deals only with local authority duties under the 1995 Act. There is a reference to 'private fostering agencies' on page 68 of Vol. 2, para 109, but this is about public fostering duties.
The 1995 Act did not change the scheme of private fostering under the 1984 Act. However, the 2001 Act includes private fostering in its description of 'fostering services' in s.2(14). In due course, local authority private fostering services, that is, how they carry out the duties imposed on them by the 1984 Act, will need to be registered with and inspected by the Care Commission. National Care Standards for Private Fostering will be required, s.5 of the 2001 Act. At the time of writing, there are no Standards, and no specific date for has been approved for the commencement of registration and inspection of these services. It should be noted that the equivalent legislation for England and Wales, the Care Standards Act 2000, does not include local authorities' private fostering services in its list of services to be registered and inspected.
The Utting Report (Department of Health, 1997) described privately fostered children as some of the most vulnerable children living away from home. The Report recommended that local authorities should keep a register of approved private foster carers, similar to the ones for child-minders, but this was not accepted at the time. Such a scheme would go further than that imposed by the 2001 Act, as it would suggest more assessment of carers than is currently carried out under the 1984 Act.
The Report of the Victoria Climbie Inquiry also deals with private fostering. Recommendation 11. is that: 'The Government should review the law regarding the registration of private foster carers.' and that that should be done within two years of the Report, that is by January 2005. Again, the disparity between the registration of childminders and the system for checking private foster carers is raised.
On the other hand, where families make private arrangements, they and the carers may resent being involved in a more formal process of checks, assessment and registration. Payment is made for some private fostering arrangements, but not all. There are issues about how assessment processes for private carers would operate, given that they are not seeking to be approved as public foster carers.
Overall, this whole area of law and practice would benefit from reconsideration. The legislation is almost 20 years old and does not reflect current trends in society or welfare concerns about the children for whom such arrangements are made. While families and carers may not want more official involvement, it remains an anomaly that child-minders and day carers have to be registered and inspected (by the Care Commission since April 2002), but private fostering carers do not, given that the former only care for children during the day, while the latter have children living with them.
QUESTIONS:
41. Should individual private foster carers be registered with local authorities, or the Care Commission, or not at all?
42. If there is registration, what method of assessment should be used?
43. If there is no registration, should there be clearer rules about the level of checks required?
44. Should there be a requirement on local authorities or the Care Commission to publish information about private fostering?