How we do it

The most important ‘builders’ in the child’s recovery are the foster carers. It is they who provide the secure home, the normal routine, and the warm caring, that enable the child to feel safe and begin to trust adults again.

Carers are therefore carefully recruited and thoroughly assessed. We ensure that our carers have a variety of backgrounds and life experiences.

We put a lot of time and effort into training and supporting carers so that they feel equipped and confident in the work they do. Carers have access 24/7 to a social worker who knows them and their placement.  This social worker meets with them as often as is needed – usually fortnightly - and supervises their work.

We try to ensure that carers know how important they are in this process so that they feel valued, in the same way that we want them to value the children we place with them. So, carers are co-professionals in our Capstone team and can expect to be treated and consulted as such. They receive a good income for the work they do and will be encouraged to follow a clearly set out career path. We encourage and sponsor carers to follow external courses in foster care (currently the Akamas BTech in Advanced Foster Care and the NVQ in Health and Social Care: Children and Young People) as well as providing our own in-house training programme which is delivered by specialists in the field.

Everyone else in the Capstone team also benefits from our focus on training and support, so social workers and administration staff also access training which they think will help them to do their jobs better.

Our therapeutic bases are located in the south-west area and it is in these offices that we have a concentration of therapeutic resources. To that end, we have ensured that a large proportion of our social workers also have a qualification in some form of therapy or counselling and all have the support of both social work supervision and access to therapeutic support.

Some children and young people benefit from more specialist help and spread across the south we have a team of child psychotherapists, play therapists and family therapists who will provide the additional support that those children need to make sense of their past life and move on to experience a happier future.

Carers in these areas also meet together regularly in small groups for carers’ clinics, where they offer each other mutual support and discuss issues that concern them about the children in their care with a therapist in the team. This is a time for catching up with carer colleagues and combines work with relaxation.

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