Concurrent fostering

[theonehandman]

Hi, this may be the wrong place, but has anyone undertaken concurrent fostering? Is anyone able to share their experience of it, I think it is relatively new, so not many people can say what it is like. Thanks

It is fairly new, not yet available in my area, unfortunately, as dd3 could have come home at 6 weeks old as opposed to 6 months.

I was speaking to a social worker yesterday who was saying it would be for children where there was at least an 80% chance of the child being adopted.

The adoptive family would need to work closely with the birth parents, but, the birth family would not be aware of where the family lived!

She was also talking about fostering to adoption plans, but that sounded very complicated.

Hi , we did concurrency , fostering to adopt , if you decide to do it you will need all the emotional support u can get as its a roller coaster of emotion . In our situation the birth mum wanted the child back and knew we wanted to adopt him so made it q difficult . Our ds had contact 3 times a week so that was difficult as comments were made as to our care of ds. Social services also don't treat you as adopter s but more like foster carers which is fine if we trained as FC s but we didn't
All I can say is to talk to others about their experience s and good luck

New Passport to Support Adopters was issued only this week by the Government this will enhance all above hopefully.
See at www.gov/government/news/new-passport-for-adopters.
also New adopters passport details are available at www.First4Adoption.
Think all will find interesting

I was a concurrent foster carer, the initiative is not at all new in some areas. My local authority has been offering concurrent care for the past five years.

It was clear to me from the outset that by being considered for concurrency, I was taking a risk that my child could possibly be turned to their birth parents, but my sw made those risks very clear to me so I understood what would be required of me and what the likely outcome was expected to be.

Thankfully things ended very positively for us, but I do know of families who have had a far tougher time than we did.

If you have any questions, do post them here or feel free to send me a pm.

Thanks, this is all very helpful stuff. We had a meeting with our SW today, and we mentioned it, I will contiinue my research. Thanks again for the advice.

Just a note that concurrency (for babies, usually moved directly from birth family) and fostering to adopt (for older children who have already been in foster care but for whom the plan has changed and they will be moved to an adopter as early as possible) are not quite the same thing.

The new plans that they have for it are different to how la's have used it in the past.
I have had baby sibling be placed with adopters from the start as it was obvious which way it was going and birth mum did state that if baby want with her she wanted the sins together.
Baaf are currently saying that children should go into foster care and then move between the shobpa and placement order - great a few years ago as they could have been months apart however due to the 26 week rule for care proceedings this is now probably only 1-2 weeks

If you're thinking about this its worth speaking to how your la are doing this. It does mean being approved as a foster carer also which in theory should be easy enough

My concurrent journey just ended.

If u r still interested in hearing stuff feel free to PM me. Don't really want to go through it on here.

PS: we had a good outcome BUT it took nearly 2 years