Specialist Foster Carer

Cheshire West and Chester Council are looking to recruit skilled and experienced foster carers who have worked with adolescents to join our Specialist Foster Carer scheme. The scheme aims to enable young people to step down from residential care and move to a family environment that can continue to meet their needs. Carers within the scheme will be part of a wraparound professional support team composing of a social worker, teacher, therapist and family support worker.

Contract and Pay

• To reflect the skills required to care for our children and adolescents, you will be paid a professional fee of £52,000 per annum
• A fostering allowance will be provided to cover other fostering expenses e.g. mileage, Christmas and Birthday money
• Regular short stays will be offered to the young person to enable a break for foster carers

Key requirements

You will need to:

• Successfully complete a foster carer assessment and approval by Cheshire West and Chester Council
• Be available on a full-time basis to care for the young person placed
• Have room to support a child or adolescent in your home
• Be able to offer a home to a solo child
• Be willing to ‘stick with’ and provide a durable relationship and offer stability
• Like and relate to young people with complex and troubled backgrounds
• Be committed to providing life enhancing opportunities and life skills to the child or adolescent
• Live in the Cheshire West and Chester area or close by
• Be able to demonstrate a caring attitude that is child centred and relational
• Be able to offer unconditional positive regard and encouragement to a young person, even whilst challenging unacceptable behaviour if needed
• Support when a young person is not engaging in/attending education, training and employment
• Be a car driver, with a vehicle suitable to be used for fostering activities
• Be able to fulfil successful DBS check
• Be able to complete mandatory training requirements
• Be able to support children and young people with family contact

Personal Characteristics

Characteristics beneficial to the role include:

• Patience
• Child centred
• Therapeutic
• Emotionally resilient
• Physically resilient
• Persistent
• Active
• Flexible
• Interested
• Positive
• Resilient family/networks
• Robust
• Empathetic
• Good communicator

Key experience

You will be expected to:

• Demonstrate experience of working with children and adolescents with complex backgrounds
• Understand the impact of trauma, attachment and neglect on children and adolescents
• Engage as part of the wider professional team involved in the scheme to create child-centred care and support
• Uphold professional fostering standards, including high quality recording and reporting
• Understand child development and effects on life experience
• Work therapeutically with children and adolescents in line with ‘our way of working’ model

Examples of professions

Previous professions suited to role include:

• Residential Worker
• Police Officer
• Teachers
• Probation Worker
• Psychiatric Nurse
• Specialist Foster Carer
• Foster carer with additional experience of complex and challenging behaviour
• Ex Staying Put Carers

Support

Support you will receive from the Fostering Team includes:

• Regular Supervision
• Carers will be afforded a standard skills and training package as well as a suite of training tailored to their needs. This aims to support carer professional development and to address the need of any young person they have in their care
• Regular liaison, joint working and support from the wider scheme team including a teacher, therapist, family support worker and social worker
• Assessments of each young person’s support needs and development of support plans