Fostering Respect
The Hackney Foster Carers' Council Podcast explores the way the Care System treats foster carers and what this means for the national crisis in recruitment and retention.
Fostering Respect
The Golden Thread
Foster Carer Liz
Addressing the toxic blame culture has the greatest power to transform Children's Social Care for the better. For everyone, including social workers. Foster carers are the least powerful adults in the network of professionals around the child, making us the most vulnerable to being scapegoated for failures in the system.
Today's episode completes the first season of Fostering Respect. It is probably the most difficult to hear but the most important for staff at every level to hear. Over 40 per cent of foster carers resign within the first two years of fostering. Liz's story is remarkable for the fact that she kept going despite being subjected to the full force of the blame culture.
Fostering Respect is the Hackney Foster Carers' Council podcast.
Hosted by Joe Chown
Produced by Jermaine Julie and Lucie Regan
Executive Producers: Debbie Bright, Kim Flack, Evette Dawkins & Liz Hughes.
Supported by The Museum of the Home
Special thanks to Rosie Watts and Mimi Buchanan
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Speaker 2:Fostering Respect, Hackney Foster Carer's Council Podcast.
Speaker 1:To complete our first season of fostering respect, we're going to hear from Foster carer Liz. This episode entitled The Golden Thread , is really about the blame culture. This is essentially the thing that needs addressing. This is the toxicity that threatens the care system. This is the reason for the high turnover of staff, for the lack of trust that exists, not just between carers and professionals, but between the different teams and children's services. This is the reason why there is a national crisis in the recruitment and retention of foster carers. And the reason why so many placements break down and lead to the overuse of residential units and agency carers, which cost the country millions of pounds every year. Welcome, Liz <laugh> .
Speaker 3:Thank
Speaker 1:You, Joe . Thank you for coming today. Do you want to start by just telling us a little bit about yourself and how you became to be a foster carer?
Speaker 3:Sure. Well, I think, I don't know if this is like other people, but I really came from completely outside. I didn't know a social worker. I didn't know a foster carer. I think maybe what put it in my head was that my grandfather grew up in a children's home and through mentoring he really made something of his life. So I heard a lot of that when I was a child. Maybe that's what planted it in my head. I'd done a lot of mentoring that I had a lot of satisfaction from that I had space in my home, and so I thought I would foster care knowing nothing
Speaker 1:<laugh>, which is kind of key to what we're gonna talk about . Do you wanna start by talking about your experience as, as you became a foster carer for the first time?
Speaker 3:Yes. Uh , well, you say that my complete inexperience, naivety about the system was key. I think in a way it was, and I think what happened to me was quite extreme, but I don't think it's that exceptional. Having spoken to a lot foster carers, as we both have about the allegations and complaints culture, we know that it's widespread. And what happened to me was just a kind of longer version of what has happened to many, many foster carers. Uh , it's actually quite difficult to talk about. I've now got a stable placement. I've got social worker who I get on with very well, and I'm part of one of the new village projects. I feel protected and settled. I've got a placement that I'm well matched with. So thinking back about what happened in this time about how extremely experiences were both the placement, the first placement I had and all the follow on repercussions, it , it's quite difficult now. I, I think when I first came into fostering and had the placement, I expected something completely different. I expected to be part of a team where we were all working with the child, but it , I , I expected to be respected. I thought that we would jointly be thinking about the child's interests all the time and how we could best serve what they needed. I found that I was seen much more as the babysitter than I was expecting, and that the professionals were far more involved in meetings and phone calls than actually working with the child. And yet they didn't really want to hear from me about what I thought the child needed, who I was spending nearly 24 7 with . And I found, I found I'm not very confusing to start with and well, it, it was confusing and I'm, I'm not really having that experience now, so I dunno how widespread that is. I dunno if it was just a particular combination of people, but we do hear other foster carers saying this type of things , things , uh, what I felt the child needed was mental health support more than anything. And that never materialized child's behavior was very, very challenging. I'm not gonna say very much about that, but just to say that the placement broke down, not through my wish or the child's wish and the , the child moved on. I think it's difficult to explain how isolated and alone you can feel with that experience. It's very difficult for a families or friends to help you when you've got a child with extreme challenges. And if you are asking for help and the help you're getting is a meeting rather than someone coming to help you, you become more and more alienated. And so I ended up giving up more and more hours of my job until I left my job. I kept losing weight. I , I weigh , I lost a quarter of my body weight. I weigh weight eight stone. Now I weigh six stone at , at one point. During this, it was, it's difficult to explain how, what a tunnel you get into in that kind of situation.
Speaker 1:Uh , as you've said, the the placement did break down , though , not your choice or the child's choice. What happened at that point after the, after the placement breakdown ?
Speaker 3:So just to add to what I said before, it wasn't all negative. A lot of my experience with the child was very, very positive. So it was, that first part was a mixed experience with the isolation and the challenges and the difficulty in getting the support I felt I needed and the child needed being , being the challenges. So after the placement broke down, nothing happened for a long time. Then there was a , an a process that was relatively new introduced, and that's why we called this the golden thread because the process is subtitle was the golden thread of connection. It was intended very well. It was a process that was intended to work outside of the blame culture to bring together everyone involved in a placement breakdown and have a reflective session. I took it like truth and reconciliation to, to try to heal after. There had been very, very difficult, a very, very difficult situation that had happened between people. Unfortunately, what happened was that the process got used like a complaint. So rather than bringing everyone together, or, I mean, I think you didn't have to bring people together, but rather than everybody reflecting on what could have been different, it was run as what went wrong and what the foster carer did wrong. So no one else's motives or actions were really examined other than mine. And no, no professional thought that there was anything they could have done differently. And it was the , it was just laid at my door really. It was, it was long. It was 27 pages long when it arrived. I was expecting some, a reflective piece. It was a shock to open something that I felt like the institution turned on me. That , that that was how I felt. And it came just before Christmas. It was a report sent saying you can't share it with anyone. 'cause there's details, very personal details about a child in it . Um , it was very hard. It was a hard read. It was hard to think that this is actually happening as a result of working so hard to try to make things work with a child that had such great needs. Then we had a redacted copy and knew Joe very kindly supported me through trying to respond to it . I think one other point to make about this is it took, everything took so long. So that report took between 18 months and two years to arrive. And then I think, I mean, it just went on and on. It was three and a half years until I fostered again because of this very long process . The other thing about the report is there were the things that completely omitted looking at like lack of mental health support for the child. It was having been through the first situation where if the processes had been followed properly, I felt quite a few situations wouldn't have arisen when the report arrived. The fact that all of the guidelines had been ignored and it had been run like a complaint,
Speaker 1:Like a serious case review. Yeah . I
Speaker 3:Spread it on
Speaker 1:A complaint mean it was as if this was a , a serious allegation .
Speaker 3:Yes .
Speaker 1:When that wasn't the reason for the placement. Braden ,
Speaker 3:There was no allegation. There was no complaint was , like I said, supposed to be the reconciliation process. But the other thing about that is when I received the report, I did speak to a couple of other foster carers who'd also had these reports , which have been used in the same way. They both felt completely blamed by them , and both of them have left fostering. Not surprisingly, I felt like leaving .
Speaker 1:Yeah , I mean , the extraordinary thing is that you did keep going , but you did with this , even though it took years . I mean, that , I think this is one of the key things that service need to learn is well , I they're aware of it that most carers will not , will not fight this not able going a brutal process .
Speaker 3:Yeah. It , it's brutal. And I think it wa it isn't just this limited one. I think most of what I've heard from foster carers who've been through allegations and complaints is that it's brutal. It is brutal. And somehow everybody disappears. All the professionals disappear . You're always left standing on your own. That's what I've heard from foster carers, and that's certainly how I felt .
Speaker 1:It's , yeah, I mean the, the , the , the words that foster carers use , and we , we've , you know , as the committee, we have held , um, workshops on this together information , you know , words like isolated, traumatized , abused , and these are , these are the types of words that foster to describe the feelings that
Speaker 3:No , it really does. I think I would say the , the , the experience with the report was worse than the difficulties with the initial placement. The initial place placement had the balancing of the, you know , the good times. But this one was difficult to see a kind of upside really .
Speaker 1:When you did respond to this , because you , you did take your time . You did write a comprehensive response to the, this, it's called the extended moving on report that , that , um, which just outlined a series of on your part blaming you for everything that went wrong . And when you did write your response, very thorough response, which highlighted all the inconsistencies, all the, the , um, things that were just factually incorrect. The profiling. Yeah. All of these examples which blamed you as the foster carer. All of the , uh, examples of, because including that there were some, there were some , um, there was some blame laid at professionals who had conveniently left , but nothing , um, no responsibility, no learning taken on behalf of the , the professional series they were in place. What, what was the response to your response?
Speaker 3:So I wrote a very long response because, because this was a process which had no governance because it was supposed to be a , a reconciliation process. So that meant I couldn't use the fostering network legal advice for complaints and allegations. So I went to a lawyer myself. It cost me 15 pounds , but I just was despairing about what I could do to defend myself. I didn't wanna just leave this lying at my door. And the lawyer said, you've got two options. You can go down the complaints process, you can write a complaint about what's happened. And given that all the conversations we were having about blame culture, bringing a complaint didn't seem like it was gonna resolve anything she said. Or you can try to speak to the service and, you know, explain your perspective and see if through that you can help people understand what foster carers are thinking. But her advice was address every point, go through the report, address every point, and have it appended to what's been written or asked for the report to be withdrawn. So that's what I did. My report's twice as long as the original one, because it takes so long to go through everything. You and I went together to the head of service. We asked for the original report to be withdrawn. They said it can't be withdrawn 'cause it has been written. So there were a few things that came out. They got rid of the e more process. So that was good. There was some work done on allegations and complaints that I think was listened to more. I felt that the senior staff were very individually sympathetic and I had emails, some of them long emails from them saying that they understood my perspective and they could see what I was saying. And their thoughts echoed mine. Uh , one manager wrote and apologized about how the emo had been using , had been used. So it's really that that was good, really good to hear that. I think what I felt was that people didn't wanna touch it . I felt there was a sort of fear of getting tangled up in something like this because it had got that blame thread in it. And this, this is like the third layer now of kind of blame happening or avoiding blame happening and what, what could have healed it is if someone had just said, I'm really sorry, but the whole thing, I'm really , I'm really sorry not just to me, to the child as well, because the , the point of all of this, the failure is for the child and the support that, that they didn't have. So that, and I think that's what the blame culture does. It stops people being able to properly identify failure, whether is failure or even just where something's gone a bit wrong and just avoid it because you attract an unwanted type of tension . I think
Speaker 1:There's a, I mean, there's a certain fear of apologizing that exists within the care system, which I , I think a lot of foster carers find absolutely baffling . Even when it is quite minor things, there seems to be a total unwillingness to just say sorry and saying sorry, is one of the most powerful things that you can do it and it does heal things. Yeah . It's so important. And when we're talking about a, a field of work where we're dealing with trauma, immense trauma all the time , trauma , the importance of healing should be the sort of focus of everything that we do. And yet we can't, the system cannot address how to apologize when things go wrong. And the , he apologies, the sort of piecemeal apologies that you had, did any of them come from people who were actually involved at that time?
Speaker 3:The apology that I had was about how the emo was used, not about the original situation. Um , I think the really scary thing about the blame culture is that I find myself now absorbing it. So I'm now aware more of how things work and you know , I try to avoid, I present things in a certain way. I see the young people learn how to do that too. It's, it's pernicious. I think it's, if we could get to the heart of this, I think , I think things could really change because it's, it's hard to let things go when you've kind of done what you , you can, to put something behind you , but you know, it's not really behind you because it hasn't properly been resolved.
Speaker 1:I mean , I completely agree with that . I think there, there have been a number of, of experiences that I've had personally as a foster carer, but also that I have , um, experienced in knowing other foster carers. And this is one of those that is the reason why I put myself forward to be chair of the Hack Foster Council . It's the reason why we're doing this podcast that these, these when experiences like that this happen and they're not apologize or they're not healed, that they're just kind of, and they're sewn up in some way and left with the expectation that we just move on. That we're not all still carrying this within us. That these aren't resolved , they're noted . We're not moving on with a clean slate . That it , it's , it's , it's that that , that it's , it's the reason why kind of we're we're doing this. I mean , it has to , it has to be resolved. And I know that from my experience of being involved with the trust and confidence in the police project, this how the police apologize is a big topic of that conversation. And they , the , the fact that the Met police with all their institutional racism, with all their institutional homophobia and misogyny and all of that, that they are , they seem to be leading the conversation in terms of how do we, how do we apologize? How do we make apologies that actually heal situations and rebuild trust? And I think the , it , it's just, to me, it's fascinating that that project is happening in the police. Yeah . And it's not happening in the care system.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I think with the police, the , the public conversation about the need for reconciliation and building trust and apologies has been going on for some time . You don't really hear it in the care system. I don't think that daylight has come in yet because it has to come from the top. In fact , my experience, what's clear to me is the way that senior staff especially reached out to me with sort of individual kindness shows that it's the culture, it's the , it's the institution they're working in , that they're locked in, I think too . That means that they're not able to apologize because they were kind of apologizing without apologizing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which doesn't heal things .
Speaker 3:No , no . I think there's something about the urgency all the time of the way , like the way we see social workers working, everything's always urgent, isn't it ? And the , the , these sort of things are important, but they're , they're not urgent. Yeah . So it's difficult for them to get to the top of the list unless something really shift , you know, it's about values , isn't it ? It's the values of the whole service . And that has to come from beyond technique .
Speaker 1:I think the, there , one of the things that I think could help initiate this, focusing more on shifting the blame culture and learning to apologize in healing trauma is the national crisis in the recruitment and retention of foster care , which is now a conversation that is taking place and is now being taken seriously at central government level. That it is , you know, the, when placements break down , when placements with, in-house, foster carers break down the, the , the likelihood of that child ending up in with an agency carer or um, in a residential unit, which are much more expensive. Options happen. And I know that within Hackney, the predicted overspend for children's services in 2024 alone is 4 million . And that cost is entirely associated with the use of residential units and agency foster carers who , um, they're spending an infinitely greater amount on than they're on their in-house, foster carers . And if actually they could understand that , that simply learning how to apologize, learning how to heal these, these situations like the one that you experienced, that that would have a massive cost saving
Speaker 3:Yeah .
Speaker 1:On the service and it costs nothing. Yeah . Apologizing costs nothing. I dunno if in their head they think that there might be the risk of being sued if they admit that they've done wrong. But the , the , the amount that you would receive as a compensation is a fraction of what it costs to put a child in the residential unit.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I mean, people probably dunno that a one year in a residential unit is probably 200 or 250,000 . So you don't have to have that many children in residential unit to make 4 million pounds . Mm-Hmm . Yeah. I think the , the , the village model , the blame culture and the mental health support and the support for first time foster carers, that those are the things that I would see . And like you say , the blame culture apologizing is free .
Speaker 1:Yeah . Yeah . Respecting foster care , listening to foster care , it's free and it , and it has , and it's the one thing that actually has the power to turn things around in the care system . Given your experience and the, the sort of distance that you have from it now, is there any advice or insights that you have around the idea of healing that you would, you would give to either other foster carers going through something similar or to the service as a whole?
Speaker 3:So I think there's a few things that made a difference to me. I dunno if they would work for someone else. One of the first things I did after the breakdown was to join the Foster Carers Council. And through that I met lots of other foster carers. I started hearing about their experience. I didn't feel so isolated. And when that emo came, it made me feel less alone than I might have done because I'd heard these experiences of allegations and complaints. So I was more able to see it as part of a culture than something directed directly at me. That made a difference, I think the way some of the senior staff did reach out, that they did small things, but it made a very big difference when I had my next placement that they really thought about it and that I input quite a lot to what would work for me. Those things work . Um , we keep saying about the village project. Being in the Village project has made a really big difference to me as well. Again, being connected with other foster carers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think on , just on that point about senior leads within the care system, I know from having conversations with them about how, how little they hear about the , the personal experiences that Fosterers go through and how so many of these things are quite easily resolved if they're aware of them. So just to , to any foster carers who are, who might be experiencing something similar at the moment, please email the Foster Carers Council and we can raise these with senior management and , and a lot of the time we find can , we can deal with it . We can resolve these issues.
Speaker 3:That is true. The thing, I've forgotten this, the thing that made the really big difference in the original placement, when I just felt I couldn't cope anymore. I actually rang my gp. First time I ever rung a gp. I rang my GP and said, I'm so stressed I can't move. And the GP sort of unpicked the story a bit and he said, does the senior management in the fostering service know what's happening to you? And I thought about it , I thought, well, maybe they don't. So I just rang a very senior manager and told her, and immediately I got more help, but I left that much too late.
Speaker 1:Well , you sharing your experience now will have a positive impact on , on other Foster . You might be going through the same thing . Thank you very much. Really appreciate you sharing your story , because I know it's incredibly painful experience to
Speaker 3:Thanks for doing this, Joe . I really think it's , you know , it's a great thing to do .
Speaker 1:Thank you, Liz . You've been listening to Fostering Respect. If you've been affected by any of the issues raised in this episode or want to find out more about fostering or the Hackney Foster Carers Council , email us on Hackney Foster Carers council@gmail.com . Today's episode was hosted by Me Do Town . The producer was Jermaine Julie from Reform Young People. And today's episode, the Golden Thread, was presented by Liz Hughes. Thank you for listening, and please join us for season two
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