Looking after friends daughter's baby

[Floellabenjamin123]

Hi all,

Looking for a bit of advice please.

My friend's daughter had a baby last year and to cut a long story short, she's had a lot of support but has had a really difficult time. Recently she has failed her parenting assessment (?) and has been told that it is likely the child would have to go into care. We said a while ago that we'd be happy to look after the child if she couldn't & my friend called yesterday to ask if we still would. We've since been in touch with the daughter who has said she is going to speak to her social worker about us possibly looking after the child.

We are waiting to hear from the social worker at the moment.

My questions are as follows (assuming it all goes ahead)

1. would this be classed as fostering from the outset?
2. what relationship would the baby have to have with its birth parents & grandparents? Do we facilitate this? Will we be given guidance by social services on what to do and what not to do?
3. what is involved (other than looking after the child)? What meetings would we need to attend? What checks will we need to have?
4. we have 2 kids of our own. Are there any good resources to help us talk to them about what has happened and why the child is with us?

Also, any other information, hints or tips that would be useful? We've not done any fostering or anything before, so are totally new to it all.

Thanks very much

Because you are not related to the child you would have a ‘connected carer’ assessment. This usually takes about 12 weeks and will be completed by a social worker, it is quite in depth. Unfortunately, it is my understanding that if the baby is removed she will have to go to approved foster carers whilst you undergo your assessments.

The baby would be very likely to have contact. If the social workers feel the baby needs to be a child looked after they will decide the format, frequency and attendees of contact. You will be expected to take the baby to and from contact but won’t need to have direct contact with birth family.

Good luck!

Thank you for that, its really useful. I hadn't realised it would take so long to go through the process. I suppose one benefit of that is that we can use that time to prepare our kids for a new arrival.

Thanks also for the info on the contact with the birth family. X

The assessment is a very intense and intrusive process. They will want to know everything about you and your family.
The child we have had 3 family members come forward as carers only to pull out when they found out how much information they needed to supply and how much their history and lifestyle was looked into.

Ok, that's interesting @cassimin
Thank you. We will prepare for a grilling!

You would need a connected person assessment which take minimum 10-12 weeks but at the minute are taking longer.

You could always ask the social worker to be approved as “regulation 24” carers whisky your full connected persons assessment is ongoing which means you would be approved as a temporary foster carer for the local authority and the child could be placed with you straight away.

*whilst

To foster, one of you needs to be a 'stay at home parent'. You can't foster full time if you have a job.
This surprised me when I looked at fostering in my area.