Fostering a Child's Recovery by Mike Thomas Terry Philpot

Author:Mike Thomas, Terry Philpot [Mike Thomas, Terry Philpot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Family & Relationships, Social Science, Social Work
ISBN: 9781843103271
Google: cVjengEACAAJ
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2009-01-15T05:29:13+00:00

Figure 3.1 The building blocks of training

•attachment and separation

•the role of a foster carer

•managing behaviour, and

•safe caring.

The courses are a mixture of small and large group work, case study and experiential learning. The weekend starts on Friday with tea, and finishes on Sunday afternoon. It is a very intensive and exhausting experience, but, as such, reflects what fostering feels like. It is intended to model good experiences of foster care. For example, the anxiety that may be evoked in carers coming to an unfamiliar venue can help them understand how children can feel when moving into placement.

Prior to the course applicants can discuss what they feel they need to resolve in order to attend – for example, in order to be thoroughly prepared, just as children should be for placement. At this time, too, as well as on the Friday and Saturday evening of the course, participants are also expected to do work that shows their increased understanding of fostering and its likely impact on their families.

The weekend uses in-house material for foster carers as well as that used with therapeutic parenting staff. It fulfils the requirements of the National Minimum Standards of Foster Care. Course work is to be done on Friday night for preparation and presentation the next day. This is also done on the Saturday night for presentation on Sunday. This writing, together with doing contemporaneous work, reflects the future requirements of carers to write diary sheets and make written records or diaries – a key skill for foster carers.

While such a course offers a good first taste, a day held a month later provides an opportunity to deal with reactions to the initial weekend and the chance to concentrate on other issues, as well as develop those already discussed.

The training on recovery and assessment is a five-day course, which includes the 24 outcomes of recovery applied to foster care (Tomlinson and Philpot 2008).

A session on attachment offers further intensive training and is linked to the integration of care and therapy, so that carers understand that the therapeutic parenting approach, which they will adopt, involves not only care but also therapeutic understanding – which leads to ‘therapeutic parenting’, which, as explained above, is different from just parenting. It is this that makes fostering different from parenting.

Further fostering training is also offered in a range of courses looking at aspects of fostering discussed in the residential course but now taken further, with concentration on:

•safe caring

•managing allegations against the carer

•independent support

•contact with the birth family

•behaviour management

•moving on from placement

•education

•self-esteem and identity; and

•first aid.

The foundation degree in therapeutic child care is organized through the Mary Walsh Institute with Glyndwr University. It has ten modules covering:

•induction to the work and initial foundation training on the work required and responsibilities of the job

•the 24 recovery outcomes

•developing knowledge and practice

•child development

•attachment, grief and loss

•social development and communication

•understanding and developing emotional intelligence

•identity and diversity

•sexual development and sexuality; and

•critical professional and personal development done with a reflective journal.

Also available is child-specific training, which is concerned with that which arises from the specific needs of an individual child.

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