Fostering education

Children in care under perform at every level at school. Only 43% of care leavers achieve one GCSE, compared with 95% of all children. Less than 1% of care leavers go to university, compared with 37% of all young people. There is evidence that many of the children in the care system have complex needs and challenging behaviour, and foster carers need specialist skills to help them cope. A number of studies have highlighted the relationship between a positive experience of school and the ‘success’ of foster placements, as well as the important part that carers can play in supporting and promoting educational achievement. Yet research also demonstrates that foster carers feel unclear and unsure about their responsibilities in relation to education. In particular, carers are often reluctant, or lack the confidence, to approach school staff with their concerns, while teachers do not always know whether they should communicate with the child’s birth family, the social worker or directly with the foster carer.

Project summary

BAAF is developing a project to enable foster carers to take a proactive role in supporting the education of children aged 5-11 in their care. We are working with the National Specialist Adoption and Fostering Team at the Maudsley Hospital to write and pilot a 10-week group-based training programme for foster carers in the London Borough of Southwark. Southwark is one of the 6 most deprived boroughs in London (Index of Deprivation, 2004). The model for the training will be the successful Fostering Changes programme, produced by the National Specialist Adoption and Fostering Team at the Maudsley Hospital in South London, and published by BAAF (Fostering Changes, Pallett et al, 2000).

The programme will be evaluated for its impact on foster carer knowledge and skill, confidence and engagement with the education of the children they care for. It will also be evaluated for the impact it has on the children’s educational achievement particularly in the area of literacy. The programme will be published for national dissemination at the end of the project.

In particular, the training programme would help foster carers develop skills to:

• Help children to learn to read and to practice their reading;
• Help children with their homework;
• Identify any learning difficulties and be able to work with teachers to address these;
• Understand the school system and the importance of working in partnership with the child’s school and teachers.
  

Project plan

This is a two year project that started in March 2007. Training in the first phase will be delivered in weekly two-hourly sessions over ten weeks to groups of 8-10 carers, with a focus on developing practical skills and strategies. Drawing on the important role that carers clearly play in training and supporting their peers, the second phase of the project will see some of these trained foster carers being trained to become ‘champions’, to mentor and support other carers.

In the second year of the project, we will carry out a detailed evaluation of the impact, both on the foster carers and the children. The second year of the project will also see the programme written up, published, launched and disseminated.

Who is carrying out the work and who is benefiting?

The work is being carried out by Dr Andrea Warman, BAAF’s Fostercare Development Consultant, and Clare Pallett, Co-ordinator, Fostering Changes Programme, Maudsley Hospital, with input from Dr Stephen Scott, Consultant Psychiatrist at the Maudsley. The project is supported by the Head of Children’s Services in Southwark, and the authority has agreed that members of the Southwark Education Support team will also be directly involved in helping to design the new programme.

Initially to be piloted in Southwark, we anticipate up to 130 children benefiting during the pilot, and as the project will produce a training programme to be rolled out nationally and made available to all foster carers through their agencies, up to 11,500 5-9 year olds in care (Office for National Statistics, Nov 2006), could potentially benefit from this project. The children will benefit from the extra support with their schoolwork, and the foster carers will benefit from developing skills to help them better support children in their care.

Evaluation and dissemination

A key part of the project is the evaluation of the impact of the training on the children and also on their foster carers. The evaluation will build on the tools developed on the Fostering Changes Programme and will include measuring:

• The time spent by foster carers reading with the child before and after the training
• The time spent by foster carers helping with homework
• The level and type of contact between the foster carer, the school and the child’s teacher
• The reading ages of children - tested before and after the programme and compared with local and national averages.
  

The training will be evaluated at each stage using a variety of recognised measuring tools. BAAF will publish and disseminate the training programme to ensure that many more foster carers have the opportunity to take part in this training and help children in their care do well at school, have a positive experience of school and, most importantly, achieve their full potential. BAAF will disseminate the programme through our network of trainer consultants across the country.

In the long term, this project will have an impact upon good practice on foster care. In addition, BAAF expects this approach to be adopted by local authorities and become mainstream practice.

We have seen carers’ confidence grow and children’s’ behaviours improve as a result of Fostering Changes – evidence clearly shows that the programme is successful on a number of levels. BAAF is now seeking to support children in care to achieve at school through this proven training method.

We are most grateful to those organisations that have generously donated funds to enable this work to take place:

1e
Clore Duffield Foundation
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
KPMG Foundation
SHINE Trust

Update

On February 22nd, during half-term week, the Fostering Education  project held an event in Dulwich Lordship Lane Library for the Southwark foster carers taking part in the pilot training and their children. Professor Keith Topping from the University of Dundee was able to observe and offer advice to the carers about using paired reading. Downstairs, in the Children’s Library Sandra Aghard told stories and read with the children and carers. The event was closed by Mike Fischetti from CBBC who showed the children just how much fun reading and poetry can be.

For further information on this project, please contact Andrea Warman