What Training will I Receive
All prospective foster carers attend a Skills to foster training course over two days. This allows them to fully understand why children need families to live with and how best to work with young people who may have experienced many difficulties in their lives.
Once foster carers are approved they will then be offered a range of training covering all aspects of working with children and professionals.
The Homefinding and Fostering Agency provide training to:
- Help foster carers to do the job to the best of their abilities.
- Improve knowledge, develop and refine skills.
- Establish an explicit positive framework of values, which promotes equality of opportunity.
- Encourage foster carers to reflect and look at the effects of discrimination in all parts of the community, recognising that they care for children in the context of a wider society and that for many children discrimination is a fact of everyday life.
- Ensure that all foster carers are competent in safe caring and protecting children from harm.
- Encourage foster carers to take responsibility for their own professional development through the creation of individual training profiles.
1. MANDATORY TRAINING
As well as the initial foster carer training weekend, there are four courses that all carers will be expected to attend within two years of being registered.
These courses are:
- Child Protection and Safe Caring
- First Aid (to be updated every three years)
- Healthy Care Programme
- Valuing Diversity
2. GENERAL TRAINING
Following discussion with foster carers, we have organised a number of new training sessions, many of which will be facilitated by outside trainers. These courses are:
- Beyond Childhood : Helping Traumatised Children make the Transition to Adult Life
- Drugs, Alcohol and Youth Culture
- How to be Good : Shame and the Development of Social Learning
- Learn the Child : Supporting the Education of Traumatised Children
- Leaving Care/Preparing for Independence
- Managing Adolescent Behaviour
- Men who Foster
- Moving On : Managing Transitions and Endings in the Care of Traumatised Children
- Separation and Loss
- Sexual Health
- Sharing the Care : Birth Children in Foster Families
- Traumatised Attachment and Strategies
- Triggers of Aggression
- Understanding the Impact of Sexual Abuse on Children and Young People – How to Monitor and Manage Sexualised Behaviour
- Why Children Lie
- You can’t choose your Parents : Surviving Exposure to Chaotic Lifestyles
