Should foster carers be treated like workers or is it a vocation?

[QuentinSummers]

A foster carer is taking a council to employment tribunal for rights equivalent to a worker. She is arguing foster carers are vulnerable to discrimination and unfair treatment.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41543651

On the radio the argument against was that foster caring is a vocation soshouldnt be paid like a job.

I think it should be treated like a job, it is work, it's providing a valuable public service and should be recognised as such.

I think caring is undervaluedin society and this is to the detriment of women.

And I think there us a creeping discourse of "it's a vocation" being used to justify underpaying people in traditional female careers - have heard this about teaching, social work and increasingly medicine.

What do you think?

Imho its a vocation and aleays should be. I hate the concept of taking in vulnerable children and treating it as a business.

But how can it be a vocation? A year of selection, a year of training. Inability to work outside of school hours if you foster older children, and actually they prefer you not to be working at all so you can attend meetings, further training, etc.

By making it a vocation, the only childfree people who would be able to do fostering would be either rich or retired; the only people with families would be where someone is able to be a SAH parent with no money worries.

And considering NO govt or LA would pay for something they could get free, I'm guessing all these people who can afford a full-time vocation aren't exactly kicking the doors down...

In my LA foster carers are considered self employed. I fostered for fifteen years, primarily teenagers. I was given a fee for the work I was doing and a maintenance allowance for the actual needs of the young people. This worked out at approximately £210 each payment, around £420 per week. So, in effect, I earned £210 per week to care for someone else child. When I say care what I actually mean is working for up to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year ( I chose not to take respite but took everyone on holiday out of my 'wages' of £210 per week)
Dealing with young people arriving at all hours of the night, drugs, assaults, theft, police raids, self harm, suicide attempts, severe personality disordered young adults, missing young people. I could go on but you get the picture. I loved my job. Sadly I hated the bureaucracy attached to the work and made the decision to leave a few years ago.
Though I was more qualified then many of the SW's I worked with, Foster carers are still seen as lowly, many 'caring' positions are.
Fostering is not a profession though some would attempt to say otherwise. It can't be until Foster Carers are educated to a professional standard in the same way as nurses, teachers and SW's. So that's not going to happen, nor would it be appropriate imo.
However, I'd love to see FC's having some employment rights. For now there are none, not one. I don't know how this could happen though as, of course a FC needs to be able to disagree with a placement of a child if that would be an unsafe choice for their family.
I fostered for an income. I used the skills and experience and education I had and chose to work in my home. I earned a lot more in previous jobs and had employment rights but I truly loved fostering in the main. Many jobs could be considered 'vocational'. I'm not actually sure why fostering should be seen as different to jobs such as Social Work, Nursing etc. Surely people who choose to work with the most vulnerable in society should be protected accordingly? And I can't see why Foster carers should feel a sense of embarrassment that they are being paid to do a job. I can assure you it IS a job! For the poster who talked about treating it as a business, for some carers it IS a business. That does not mean they can not do a great job. All the time there are statements such as these there will remain the Foster carers who lie through their teeth about 'doing it for the love of it' Those foster carers rarely hand their fee back to their Local Authority!

Ok i'm really not sure how to make the system better. Bit I admire foster parents. They are incredible people.

Perhaps the foster children could be graded (bit difficult and I'm sure there will be an outcry on this thread) but if the child for example cannot be left / as the example above, cannot be in the company of a man / has severe disabilities needs assistance with everyday life, then they are a grade whatever and this grade gets more respite/ time off/ higher payment as there is no possibility of the fostercarer working etc. The age of the child would influence this so perhaps as they grow older they become a lower grade. I don't think you can generalise about fostering as some children must be there short term due to family issue and returned after a few weeks, others might be rejected by their family and need care all of their childhoods. Also some may go on to be adopted. And the health issues must be right across the board.

I agree, notarehearsal.

The problem with "vocational" roles that historically have been fulfilled by women, is that it ties the actual doing of the role to there being something inherent about the women that perform it.

Look at the language that is used to describe (good) nursing care (linked to my own experience); compassion, love, kindness, sensitivity let alone the imagery of nurses as angels that you find commonly in the press. These are all heavily gendered terms that tap into this 'innate female sensitivity' that is spouted as enabling women to perform intimate, often sequestered and unpleasant, difficult, life-cycle linked jobs. When I went into nursing as a postgraduate, people told me I was making such an "admirable sacrifice" and "there's no way I could do it". I would argue this type of nonsense keeps the pay low and suppresses nursing from being the profession it clearly is; no one talks about physios, speech and language therapists, dieticians or other HCPs in the same romanticised way.

The reality is though it is a job. Most councils expect foster carers to not work.

And it's agencies pay 350 a week on average, not 500.

Of course foster carers should be paid a living wage and have proper respite and support.

In no other career do we argue "make sure the conditions are really difficult and its paid as badly as possible, that way we'll get the best possible people performing at their best".

Melony - in effect, children needing foster care are graded but not on a scale of 1-10. Some have higher needs than others, some could only be placed with an experienced foster parent.

(And needs tend to get more demanding as children grow up, not less....)

Yeah the fee for fostering teenagers tends to be higher than that for fostering under 10s.

The cost of such children being accommodated in children's homes is many times higher. It's frustrating that they can't put a bit more in at the bottom floor to keep children out of institutions.

Babies get a relatively low payment, but can have withdrawal issues, serious health needs and developmental delays that show only with time. I damaged my shoulder sleeping with my hand in the baby's cot, because he couldn't settle. Had he been mine, I could have coslept with him. That's a life long injury.

Of the 4 children I fostered, all 4 have significant developmental, emotional, or physical needs.

No one would expect a nanny to look after challenging children 24 hours a day.

I couldn't sustain the pace- I burnt out after seven years.

To answer the point about holidays - usually the FC doesn't have parental responsibility, and has to seek consent from those that do (often the birth family) to take a child out of the country. Even domestic holidays can be impossible if no agreement to miss contact with birth family can be reached. My DP's fostered some preschoolers for 2 years - throughout those 2 years there was court-ordered contact with the birth family 3 times a week. How can you take the kids with you, like part of the family, in those circumstances?

Foster carers do get paid peanuts when you compare it to a nanny or a childminder. Not to mention that the role is 20 times more difficult and you need a larger property to accommodate the children.