Training & events programme

Foster carers are increasingly being asked to care for a parent and their child during care proceedings, and to contribute towards the assessment of parenting capacity. This type of arrangement is complex, involving different tasks and responsibilities.

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Despite ongoing national reforms to the kinship care agenda, there is still a dearth of knowledge relating to the assessment, engagement and support needs of African and Carribbean kinship care families. Sharon McPherson, co-director of Families in Harmony, set out to explore this knowledge gap by conducting an exploratory mixed method approach in Jamaica – the country of origin for the largest population of Windrush migrants- which included semi-structured in-person one-to-one interviews with around 10 kinship caregivers and 20 professionals.

Panel advisors have a complex role in managing the relationship between the agency and the panel, quality assuring and feeding back to all involved in panel work. This open course will enable panel advisors to examine this role in detail and build on effective practice as they carry out their role and responsibilities including: quality assurance; inducting new panel members; contributing to the appraisals of panel members; feeding back issues to the agency and working with the agency decision maker. Case scenarios, group work and practice application will provide opportunities for panel advisors to address shared dilemmas and good practice.

Cultural competence involves ensuring our attitudes, communication and behaviours recognise and respect cultural differences. As social workers, in whatever our role, it’s essential we are continually working towards cultural competence in our practice. In this open course, you will be supported to explore some of the key concepts within cultural competence and anti-oppressive practice, and then apply this learning to your practice. It will include exploration of how personal and professional identities can impact on the decisions we make in our professional roles.

This course is an opportunity to explore the legal and practice framework of private fostering, including thinking about how to identify and work with this often unseen group of children.

This open course course will enable participants to increase their understanding of the role of permanence in children's lives. By reflecting on best practice, it will help those attending to form permanence plans that are geared to improving the outcomes for children and young people, including their emotional, cognitive and physical development.

The good practice guide, Safeguarding children living with foster carers, Adopters and Special Guardians: Learning from case reviews 2007–2019, is based on a UK wide study of 52 case reviews concerning 98 children who had experienced serious harm while living with foster carers, adopters or special guardians. The study spans 12 years and is the first to focus exclusively on reviews of cases of children in alternative family care. It shines a spotlight on those issues particular to these children – selection and assessment of carers; support for children and carers; and the supervision and management of arrangements.

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The Weekenders Programme by Now Foster is a new approach to fostering that offers consistent weekend care, building lasting relationships between new foster carers and children in care. This session will introduce the programme’s approach, how it operates across Greater London to support children in care orders, kinship and SGO care, and what we've learned so far. Designed in partnership with care-experienced young people, Weekenders responds directly to their needs and hopes. This event offers a chance to explore what's possible in fostering and how we bring more loving adults and relationships to the lives of care-experienced young people.

All young people who are either care experienced or had social workers involved in their childhood, have the right to access the information that is written about them and saved on their files. In this open course, we examine these legal rights and the various legal frameworks that govern the processes around accessing care files. We consider best practice in supporting young people to access their care files, as well as consider the psychological and emotional benefits.

The Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund has been available to children living with special guardians since 2016, and its name was changed in 2023 with the publication of the National Kinship Care Strategy. Although the number of applications made on behalf of children living with special guardians is slowly increasing, the number of applications is still considerably lower than those made for adopted children.