Short breaks fostering

[NickMyLipple]

Hello :)

I am very very interested in doing short breaks fostering. I've been carefully considering it for about 5 years now, and it seems like a good time given that myself and DP have bought a house and are very settled in life.

I'm a paediatric nurse and I work as a special schools manager. I've worked with SEND children for 10 years and have heaps of experience and passion.

I'd love to foster full time, but I love my career and I am not ready to give that up just yet, but it is flexible including being able to work from home occasionally.

I'd like to do short breaks for weekends and school holidays. I know there is a demand as I work with children who go to this type of arrangement/respite.

I can't work out the difference between an agency and LA for this arrangement- what's the pros and cons for each?

Thanks :)

What you're describing would be a respite carer if you were to go with my LA. There's a few in my LA who purely do respite.
The pros of going with an LA would be if you prefered to look after babies/young children, you're more likely to get that age range rather than if you were with an agency.
The cons are that you might not get a lot of respite placements with either, but I would think school holidays particularly the summer, that you would get a couple.

It's short break care here, although previously known as family link. We've just started doing it after a break from full time foster care to have our own children, and its 26 days a year, so we are doing every other weekend with one family. Our LA try to avoid respite care so although we were available for this over the last couple of years, we didn't get any placements. Short break care is more reliable (hopefully!).

The key difference from a full time placement is that the children are not in care, and therefore you are more likely to have children with disabilities.