Foster care.

I don't only write here. In fact I only started this blog to try and broaden my scope and get to write about more than fostering.

Last night I caught a message on a fostering website that set me to thinking. It was from a youngish person who is thinking about fostering but spoke volumes of an unresoleved anger and hurt.

In it's body it alluded to two things that every so often rear their heads in fostering, money and welfare of children.

Every so often you meet someone who notes that some (but not all) foster carers get rather a lot of money every week. This weekly money is not subject to income tax like everyone else. It is tax free money, and for that there is a very good reason. Foster carers do not get a wage, don't have a salary, they get an allowance which is linked to the children in their care.

Often people think that foster carers earn huge sums of money but claiming means tested benefits is more often the case.

Houses must be larger, furniture replaced more often, car's are bigger. Foster carers are also subject to all sorts of regulation and inspection that simply passes parents by.

Allowances are paid for children, if the child goes, and they might at any time, the money stops.

If the carer gets hurt, maybe even if it's by the child so they cannot work. The money stops.

The carer gets ill, the money stops.

Carer takes a holiday, that is a real holiday where you do not do what you do when you are in work, the money stops.

There is the venus fly trap of fostering, the money to pay for the big house and big car and big bills is there, until you stop.

It used to be that a foster carer might devote 30 years to caring and be left with no pension, at all, left to live on nothing a week. There are many foster carers out there who are living out their retirement on means tested benefits.

Is this something to be jealous of?

Put like that I am not so sure.

But of course then we come to the Children bit.

The poster rounded on foster carers and said she would not trust any of us with her children.

Thank god for that I say.

With a few spectacular individual cases there is little evidence that being with foster carers harms children.

There is however an overwhelming body of evidence though that contact with the social care system predicts a poor outcome.

Recently a panicked head of childrens services said that in the wake of child P lots more children should not be taken into care as the outcome would be bad for the children. One might wonder if this might also dent his budgets but of course he was not thinking that way. He was totally focused on children.

No, he cited the fact that he was running a bad system as a reason not to take children into care, not a challenge for the next time he sat as his desk.

I wonder what that says.

Then again foster carers use up shed loads of money, as I said.

Much of it goes into the coffers of private agencies who decide to better what local authorities could do then force the same local authorities to feed their profits to get the people they might have been able to use themselves had they shown a bit of respect.

It's not about money it's about children and someone needs to start putting them at the front of their thinking. Really thinking about children and not "I go home at 4.30" or there is "50p in the budget".

Sorry I am in rant mode too.

R