In response to the refugee crisis, the Fostering Network has called for more people to come forward to foster refugee children. A Christian faith group have also encouraged its community to foster and 9,000 people have apparently expressed an interest in fostering refugee children. A policy response is now needed that provides an increase in funding to local authority family placement teams so that social workers are able to recruit and assess more carers for unaccompanied refugee children.
Foster carers in Britain have a long tradition of meeting the needs of refugee children. Our state’s involvement in foster care began in the second world war, when children were evacuated from London to seek refuge from the blitz. Long before the hashtag #refugeeswelcome, foster carers and adopters have been welcoming refugee children and young people into their families, for example, when the orphaned children of the Vietnamese boat people were in need of refuge in the late 1970s.
In recent years, foster carers have opened their homes to children and young people arriving from Afghanistan and Iraq. They have done this largely unnoticed and until this point the public care system has for the most part coped. However, there has continually been a desperate shortage of available carers, with the Fostering Network estimating a need for more than 8,000 carers before the recent crisis.
Prior to becoming a social work academic, I worked for West Berkshire council’s family placement team where I witnessed the creativity and commitment of social workers and foster carers. But there are warning signs that relying on the creativity and commitment of practitioners and carers is not enough.
Recent government statistics show there were 2,168 unaccompanied refugee children and young people in the UK in the year ending June 2015. While this is a very small number in the grand scheme of things, it has risen by 46% over the past year.
The impact of this is evident in south-east England, where in recent months the demand for family placements for refugee children has increased. This has resulted in the opening of Swattenden, a residential centre in Kent to house 40 young people. Yet however good the standard of care is, family settings, not institutions, are more appropriate places for children and young people to grow up in, particularly those escaping the traumatic experiences of war.
There is an immediate need to recruit more carers and in the longer term to promote fostering and recruit carers from within the refugee communities which speak refugees’ language and reflect their heritage.
The government could better support local authorities with extra funding to develop training opportunities for practitioners to focus on the needs of refugee children. Funding to develop support groups would allow foster carers to come together to share their knowledge and experiences. Forming support groups for the unaccompanied children and young people would also be of huge benefit. Particularly if they are placed cross-culturally, as this could provide them with the opportunity to meet with others who share their language and culture and their experiences of migration. It would provide an opportunity to access valuable emotional support from their peers.
The reality of refugees’ experiences has driven a humanitarian desire to respond. Local charities have been set up and solidarity marches organised as the nation tries to help. Fostering a child or young person who has arrived in this country unaccompanied is a way to do just that. However, to capitalise on this demonstration of humanity the government needs to come forward now to better support fostering and adoption.
Find your local fostering services at http://bit.ly/1Lo3MrF
