The foster care schemes are designed to provide short breaks for children and support for parents who are experiencing difficulties or stress. They offer a flexible service that can be used by families in a variety of circumstances, such as when a child is excluded from school or a parent needs to spend regular short stays in hospital.
The health department commissioned the Thomas Coram Research Unit at the Institute of Education in London to find out more about barriers that deterred local authorities from establishing such schemes. The report, Support foster care: Developing a short-break service for children in need, published this week by the Institute of Education, said that local authorities feared the recruitment of support carers would reduce the pool of potential foster carers even further. Many schemes have struggled to keep going financially and have only been able to develop by tapping into other sources of funding.
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