Types of Placement (including changes e.g. Adoption)

There are many different types of placements and Leicester City Fostering Service may not currently offer the full range shown here.

Short-term Fostering:
Short-term carers provide temporary care for a child/young person, who is unable to live with their family. The placement can last from a few days or weeks, months or longer. The placement is temporary while plans are made for the child. Regular contact with significant people such as birth family is an important part of short-term fostering.

Long-term Fostering:
Long-term carers offer permanent homes where adoption is not suitable for a child/young person.

Short Breaks for Disabled Children:
These carers provide respite care to children with disabilities living with their own families. This gives their parents or usual foster carers a break.

Respite Care:
Respite carers also offer support to other foster carers. Foster carers sometimes need this support to ensure placements continue to succeed for all concerned, and respite care will be provided only when it is in the child's best interests which includes improving placement stability. Any respite care provided will take full account of the child's needs.

Connected Carers:
These carers provide placements for a child/young person who cannot live with their birth parents but can live within their extended family network, or a friend of the family. These placements help to provide continuity of care, family, school and friendships, networks and keep the child/young person's cultural and individual identity.

Specialist Fostering:
Specialist fostering is for young people who are going through difficulties and have a higher level of need that cannot be met within general fostering.

Parent and Baby/Child Fostering:
For parents and their babies/children who are in need of support and assessment of their parenting skills.

Emergency Care:
Emergency carers provide time-limited placements for a child/young person in emergencies, these placements usually happen out of office hours.

Sibling Groups:
Where brothers and sisters are placed together.

Children Seeking Safety (also known as Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children):
Foster carers who provide placements for a child/young person seeking sanctuary and asylum from their own country of origin.

Staying Put Arrangement:
Staying Put arrangements are arrangements to extend the foster placements into a 'Staying Put' arrangement by agreement between the care leaver and the carer, in order to support the young person until such time that they are fully prepared for adulthood. They young person will no longer be cared for under the fostering regulations as the Staying Put arrangement occurs when the young person turns 18. The arrangement ensures the young adult can experience a transition similar to their peers, avoid social exclusion and be more likely to successfully manage their independence when they do move on. Your Supervising Social Worker will discuss this with you when your foster child reaches the age 16 years as part of their care planning.

Shared Lives Placements
When a young person reaches 18 and has additional needs such as a physical disability, mental health issue, learning disability, foster carers may want to support the young person post-18 by becoming a Shared Lives carers. Shared Lives Schemes are run by the Local Authority and are separate from placements under the fostering regulations.

On approval the Fostering Service will decide how many children you are approved for, what age, gender identity and category of approval. There are times, however, when the fostering service may ask you to take a child/young person outside your approval range if it is felt this would be a way to meet the child's needs.

When this happens the fostering service can vary your approval for a short time either to allow for longer term plans to be made or for a review of your approval as a foster carer to be done so that your approval status can be changed in order to accommodate the child for a longer period.

The 'usual fostering limit' is three, so nobody may foster more than three children unless:

• The foster children are all siblings (then there is no upper limit); or
• The local authority within whose area the foster carer lives, exempts the carer from the usual fostering limit in relation to specific placements.

In considering whether to exempt a person from the usual fostering limit, the local authority must consider:

• The number of children whom the person proposes to foster;
• The arrangements which the person proposes for the care and accommodation of the fostered children;
• The intended and likely relationship between the person and the fostered children;
• The period of time for which they propose to foster the children;
• Whether the welfare of the fostered children (and any other children who are or will be living in the accommodation) will be safeguarded and protected;
• If a young person is staying in placement post-18 either via Staying Put or Shared Lives, this does not affect the fostering limits but consideration should be given to what the foster carer can realistically take on and the size of the accommodation.