Jimmy Johnstone touches on the wider issue of the need to professionalise foster care (Foster care saves lives. Our work deserves employment rights, theguardian.com, 23 October). At a time when CAMHS waiting lists stretch to months even for priority cases (I know this, I’m a GP) foster carers provide what is often the only therapeutic input to the most vulnerable children with the greatest needs in our society.
Basic “skills to foster” training is now typically delivered over two weekends and augmented in an ad hoc way with whatever other continuing development training is available locally. Like Mr Johnstone, my wife and I are carers on the specialist scheme, designed to provide home-based care for looked-after children with the most complex and enduring difficulties. These are the children we try to nurture in a permanent family. To qualify for the specialist scheme one of us (my wife) must have no other employment. We are paid at the highest rate of any foster carers and we get two weeks’ paid leave annually. Calculated on an hourly rate, this remuneration package is around a third of the current minimum wage. To properly train and pay foster carers would be expensive for the state, though these costs would be offset by better lives for the cohort of young people who currently leave care destined to make up around half of the prison population. These children, and the foster families who care for them, should be valued much more.
John Macleod
GP, Bristol
• Douglas Adams helpfully observed that difficult things and people can be “disappeared” through the application of an SEP (somebody else’s problem). Jimmy Johnstone’s moving article about his family being ignored and left at risk from a vulnerable and distressed foster child re-echoes in the lives of foster, adoptive, and special guardianship families across our country on a daily basis.
The accelerating neglect of children’s services in a country preoccupied with Brexit, and increasingly contemptuous of the regulations that keep things safe, leaves these brave and persevering folk feeling “disappeared” and with nowhere to turn. The tragedy that follows is one in which all participants are designated as problems, and the spirit of generosity and love, essential to repair the lives of children who did not choose their complicated histories, is undermined.
At this moment, I am aware of clinicians continuing to work with families when arrangements to pay them have broken down. Last week in a desperate and unguarded moment a social worker told me “there is no system, we can’t help children”. Systems and support depend on people noticing and working together to protect against SEPs. Thank you for publishing a reminder to notice, which might help sustain love, generosity and hope in these troubled times.
Mark Waddington
Director, Placement Support
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition
