Where did the original idea for Protective Care come from, and what challenges within fostering practice was it designed to address?
Protective Care began with a recognition that fostering practice had evolved significantly since Safer Caring: A New Approach was published in 2012. While Safer Caring helped shift practice away from blanket restrictions and towards more risk-sensible decision-making, we knew there was an opportunity to go further.
Across our work with fostering families, fostering services, and national governments, we repeatedly hear concerns about risk-averse practice, inconsistent decision-making, and foster carers feeling unsure about what they can and can't do alongside an ongoing feeling that foster carers are not trusted and valued as part of the team and therefore communication is not where it needs to be.
At the same time, we know children need opportunities to develop, build relationships, and experience family life in order to recover from trauma and thrive. For this to happen, the system needs to work better and the question we sought to answer is, ‘how do we keep children safe without making fostering feel like a series of restrictions and processes?’.
Protective Care is designed to address that tension. It aims to help everyone think about safety together in a more balanced way, where children are protected, but where care is also relational, trauma-informed, and focused on helping children flourish rather than simply avoiding risk.
Who was involved in developing the Protective Care approach, and how did foster carers, practitioners and care-experienced people contribute?
Protective Care wasn't developed in isolation. We worked closely with foster carers, fostering services, social workers, managers, trainers, and care-experienced people throughout the development process. We also engaged with colleagues across the four nations to ensure the framework reflected different policy and practice contexts.
Foster carers brought invaluable practical insight. They challenged us to think about what actually works in family homes day to day. What care-experienced people brought back to us is the importance of relationships. They told us children want to feel trusted, listened to, part of a family and not defined solely by risk. Safeguarding processes can sometimes feel that way to children.
The result is a framework that is grounded not just in theory, but in lived experience.
How did the concept develop from an initial idea into the finished publications, resources and training programme?
It has been an evolutionary journey to reach the point we have today.
What started as conversations about updating Safer Caring quickly became something much bigger and we discovered we weren’t just updating a publication. As we explored the issues with carers and services, it became clear that we were talking about trauma, relationships, decision-making, support networks, allegations, the confidence of foster carers and what children need in order to feel safe and building on the significant learning that as a sector we have gained since 2012.
Practice should always be pushing at boundaries, challenging assumptions and ensuring that we strive for the very best for children. The Protective Care framework came from combining this learning with understanding of the challenges fostering families face every day whilst always holding in mind our highest aspirations for children. We tested ideas with practitioners and carers, refined the language and tools, and created practical resources that could be used in everyday fostering practice.
Alongside the publication, we have developed training because we know lasting change doesn't happen through reading guidance alone. Services need opportunities to reflect, discuss, and think about how principles translate into practice and from there how they become embedded as culture.
What evidence, research and existing best practice informed the development of Protective Care?
Protective Care draws on a range of evidence and best practice.
It is strongly influenced by trauma-informed approaches, research on child development and attachment, learning from adverse childhood experiences, and evidence about the importance of relationships in helping children recover from trauma.
It also builds on existing fostering practice, including the original Safer Caring guidance, work around delegated authority, strengths-based practice, restorative approaches, and risk-sensible decision-making.
Importantly, we didn't want to produce something that sat separate from what people already do well. We wanted to bring together existing learning into a coherent framework that supports good practice. Perhaps most importantly, it was informed by the experiences of the people living and working within fostering every day.
What does “Protective Care” mean in practice, and how does it differ from more traditional approaches to managing risk?
Protective Care is about creating the conditions where children feel safe enough to recover and thrive. In practice, it means understanding behaviour in context, planning ahead, building strong relationships, involving the whole team around the child, and making decisions that balance safety with opportunity.
The difference is that traditional approaches can sometimes focus on avoiding risk altogether. Protective Care asks a different question.
Instead of simply asking: "How do we stop something bad from happening?" it asks: "How do we keep children safe while helping them develop, belong, and experience family life?"
The shift from risk avoidance to risk-sensible, trauma-informed care is at the heart of the framework.
Who are the Protective Care resources and training designed for, and how can different members of the fostering community benefit from them?
One of the things we discovered while developing Protective Care is that everybody involved in fostering is often talking about the same issues, but from slightly different perspectives.
Foster carers tell us they want more clarity and confidence in making day-to-day decisions. Social workers talk about the challenge of balancing safety with children's need to experience family life and independence. Managers want greater consistency in decision-making, and care-experienced people speak powerfully about the importance of relationships, trust and feeling that they belong. What is clear is that no single group can make this work on their own.
So Protective Care has been designed for the whole fostering community. It provides foster carers with practical guidance and confidence in their role, recognising them as the people who know children best day to day. It gives practitioners and services a shared framework for thinking about risk, safety, relationships and support. And it helps everyone involved work from the same understanding of what good fostering looks like.
Although different people will use the resources in different ways, the real strength of Protective Care is when foster carers and professionals use it together. That's when it becomes more than a publication or a training course. It becomes a shared language and a shared approach that helps children experience greater stability, stronger relationships and the sense of safety and belonging that every child deserves.
How does Protective Care help foster carers create safe, nurturing homes while still allowing children and young people to enjoy ordinary family life?
One of the things we hear consistently is that foster carers often feel caught in the middle of two important responsibilities.
On the one hand, they want to keep children safe.
On the other, they want children to experience the things that help them feel part of a family and part of their community. But foster carers can often worry about getting things wrong. A conversation that has stayed with me during the development of Protective Care was with a foster carer who told me, ‘Sometimes it feels like every decision is a test’. Something as simple as a sleepover, learning to catch a bus independently, or giving a child a hug when they were upset could leave them wondering whether they were making the right decision or whether someone might later question it.
We know children don't thrive because every possible risk has been removed from their lives. They thrive when they feel safe, cared about, and supported to take age-appropriate steps towards independence. Foster carers aren’t asking how to avoid caring for children, they are asking how to care for children well whilst keeping them safe. For me, that's Protective Care in a nutshell. It's about helping foster carers move from fear and uncertainty towards confidence and planning. It's about creating the conditions where children can experience safety, belonging, relationships and opportunity, whilst knowing that the adults around them are thinking carefully about how to support them.
Protective Care is about helping fostering families parent with confidence rather than fear.
How does the approach support fostering services to respond more clearly and proportionately when concerns or allegations arise?
One of the challenges services often talk to us about is the pressure to make significant decisions quickly, sometimes with limited information. One of the key strengths of Protective Care is that it promotes shared understanding before difficulties arise.
When there are clear plans, agreed expectations, effective communication and contextual understanding of a child's needs and behaviours, services are better placed to respond proportionately if concerns do emerge.
This links directly with the Allegations Toolkit. Together, the two frameworks encourage thoughtful assessment avoiding unnecessary escalation wherever possible.
They support better decision-making and reduce the likelihood of harm being caused by the response itself to children, foster carers and their families.
What do you hope participants will take away from the training, and how can services embed the principles into everyday practice?
Embedding Protective Care means using it consistently from recruitment and assessment through to supervision, planning meetings, matching, reviews, and support for foster carers.
It becomes most powerful when it becomes part of everyday conversations and decision-making for the whole team around the child.
I hope people leave the training feeling reassured that Protective Care isn't another task or another form to complete. I hope they leave feeling more confident about balancing safety with relationships and more confident in the decisions they make every day and more willing to discuss and reflect on how they approach this.
If participants leave feeling better equipped to parent with confidence rather than fear, then we’ll have achieved something important.
Now that the resources and training have launched, what would success look like for Protective Care in the months and years ahead?
Success would be seeing Protective Care become part of the culture of fostering rather than simply a publication on a shelf.
