To wonder how people can afford to foster

[Janepear]

The allowance is £140 pw and obviously you can’t work. We are just trying to work out how we could afford to do it. Anyone any ideas?

You also get an allowance for the children for day to day expenses. Dla if you have children with mobility issues or SN. You can work whilst being a foster carer but there is so much training, meetings for the children, contact with family and school meetings work must be quite flexible. Plus worrying about school holidays.

What about the periods in between having a foster child placed with you? I'm assuming you don't get any fostering allowance then but neither can you get a job as you'll have to be ready for the next placement.
Unless you have several children constantly, it sounds quite insecure.
I'd want a good income coming in from somewhere else to be able to consider it.

Our LA pay fees and allowances.

Around £280 a week per child.

My friend usually fosters two children at a time, so £2300 a month.

£140 a week is a lot of money for a child and most people on benefits do fine with more children and less money, so I think it’s possible! £20/30 weekly food shop for the child, the rest towards clothes, bills etc. Easily done if you live within your means

Also, there is a massive national shortage of foster carers at the moment and a rise is children being taken into care....LA's simply cannot place within their own placements a lot of time and this includes the age range that you are looking at.

Obviously it's not about the money but you'd need to maintain a certain standard of living eg, electricity working, phone line connected for you to get a placement I assume.

It would be very rewarding though, my ex was from a foster family and he couldn't speak highly enough of them.

Of course fostering isn't about money ,but people have to live, if they foster children with more challenging behaviour and or special needs, than it can be hard to work , would foster carers not as be entitled to tax credits etc ?

You shouldn’t be looking to foster to make a huge profit from it. It’s something you need to be rather selfless to do, rather than looking to make a quick buck on a child’s misery.

It’s something i looked into in previous years, but sadly also decided I couldn’t afford it. I am a shift worker now and couldn’t maintain that whilst fostering, and the payments, certainly in my area, wouldn’t come close to covering basic living costs. It wasn’t even a case of considering tightening my belt, I’d have to just skip paying the mortgage to come anywhere near having enough money left over to feed and cloth said foster child.

I looked at the agencies instead of through LA and essentially was told that to get anything more than the basic payments I would have to take a child that didn’t fit in with what I felt I could support.

I dont think the OP is looking for a profit, more that they could afford the cost of another child within the household? Children do cost money, they do eat and use water, gas and electricity you know.

I'd love to foster & now my youngest is a little older (9), I'd be keen to give it a go - how do people usually get started?

That’s nearly double what you would get as a carer to a relative.

How do foster carers who do short term placements cope with not knowing if you will have a child and therefore income week to week?

Oldowl- I started when my (then) youngest was nine. She is at university now and has become very close to some of the children we have fostered. Although it hasn’t always been easy, I really feel like my birth children have benefitted from the fostering - it has given them a bit of an insight into the difficult circumstances that some people have to deal with.

Have you spoken to your LA to see what they pay? I know the figures on our LA website are less than the money that is paid. We are a few weeks away from going to panel to see whether or not we are suitable foster parents and it has been made clear that one of us will be expected to give up work (in our case me because I am the one with the experience in working with children with additional needs and complex medical needs). Our allowances will enable us to foster as without them we wouldn't be able to live. I was fostered many years ago and it wasn't always a pleasant experience, I am not going into it for the money but being paid will mean we can afford to foster, without payment there would be far fewer placements.

We have family members who fostered, mainly babies. You can't really do another job, as looking after a baby is 24/7. They collected quite a few straight from hospital and kept them until they went for adoption.
I think you do it because you want to help people, not to make money.
In their case the money they made was very small in comparison to the hours worked.
You also have to be available to take the baby to contact, which is often some distance from the foster home, be prepared for meetings (often cancelled at the last minute) and be prepared to undertake training.
It can be extremely rewarding, but also very sad when the baby moves on, because although you know (hope) they are going to a better future, they become part of the family.

It's definitely a vocation. I know someone who had previously been a stay at home mum and became a foster mum so wasn't financially worse off. She fostered a range of ages and I don't think it would have been practical for her to work. Some of the children needed her in the house (at least at first) even if they were technically old enough to be alone.

Sorry I meant alone after school (e.g. 13 year olds) obviously the toddlers/babies couldn't have ever been alone.

What about the periods in between having a foster child placed with you?
If the trend of children continues there won't be any times of having no children such is the national shortage!!!
We ( our LA) have had to send children to foster placements literally across the country from their home town _250+miles away from their home, school, friends and family because we haven't enough carers. This is after they've had a few weeks in a children's home while daily national searches are conducted.

I don't know where you are getting 140 a week from, my LA is advertising £468 per week per child, with £500+ for a child with 'challenging needs'. An acquaintance runs a house with a maximum of 6 teenage girls. That's £2800 pcm, broadly tax free.

Foster Carer Payments
Compass average a weekly payment of £370 for every child living in your home, this includes both the professional fee paid to you as a foster carer and the child’s living allowance. On average our carers support between one and two children every week and therefore the actual average carer weekly fee is in excess of £460

www.compassfostering.com/why-compass-fostering/rewards-benefits/

EXAMPLE THREE

A carer has a 14 year old boy exhibiting problematic sexual behaviour. The carers received £760 per week for the length of the placement.
POST-TAX EARNINGS OF
£36,216

Possibly a silly question, but what is in it for private agencies? Where does the money (and come to that, the children) come from?

I had no idea this wasn't all managed by the council/lea.

user the LA pays the agency because they don't have enough foster carers themselves.
OP assuming your DH works, what did you do when you were at home with your DC when they were a baby? Is this not similar?

Whatweretheythinking- fostering may not be about the money, but out of the goodness of your heart doesn’t pay the bills or keep the roof over your head!!!

TraLaLaaaaa, you speak a lot of sense. As an ex-foster carer, this is a subject very close to my heart. Foster caring is a profession (and recognised by the Government as such), much like being a teacher or a child protection social worker, a nursery worker or a paediatric consultant. All of whom receive a salary for their professional input - without any outcry from society. The demonising of foster carers for - shock - receiving payment in exchange for their niche skills results in the perpetual deskilling and devaluing of a profession that is a lynchpin in saving and rehabilating some of society’s most vulnerable children.

The reason I’m a former foster carer is that I adopted the child who was discharged to my care from SCBU, following the death of a prior sibling - but from day one of placement, I had to transport a newborn on a 20-mile round journey five days a week for separate early morning daily contacts with both birth parents, plus welcome at least three social worker visits a week to my home, keep up with my continuous professional development training sessions at training venues 10 miles away, file daily reports to children’s social care about the baby’s progress,, provide detailed reports for the family courts (two years of complex legal proceedings), organise and transport to/fro weekly contact sessions 15 miles away with various birth siblings, host regular multiple-agency review meetings - and then find the time to be a mum substitute! In between being a mum to my first child!

Contrast this with the general advice on MN for mums of newborns to sit on the sofa for several/many weeks to get to grips with bonding with their newborn, especially following nights upon night of lack of sleep.

It takes a resilient, determined and hardworking person to maintain a professional facade doing all of the above (and being threatened by birth family members) for the princely sum of £256 a week.

And, OP, the reason I could afford to foster is that I had been very successful in a previous career and now live mortgage free. If I were the Prime Minister, I would pay foster carers more than I earned; I can think of no other profession where people are expected to give of themselves 24/7, are paid so little for such a critical ‘job’ and then roundly criticised for receiving any payment whatsoever, and the expectation is that we should do it for free - and if we don’t, we’re somehow suspect.

Excellent, realistic post Moomin

Perfectly put Moominmamma.