Protective Care is The Fostering Network’s new publication, developed to replace Safer Caring: A New Approach.
It has been created to better reflect the realities of fostering today, supporting fostering services to help carers provide children with the warmth, stability, belonging and protection they need to thrive.
Foster carers make important decisions every day to help keep children safe while giving them the freedom to grow, learn and experience ordinary family life.
Protective Care supports fostering services to move beyond one-size-fits-all rules and embed a more individualised, trauma-informed approach to risk. It helps foster carers, supervising social workers, children’s social workers and the wider team around the child work together to understand each child’s needs, support consistency and make proportionate decisions.
This publication is designed to help fostering services strengthen practice, support carers with confidence and clarity, and create safer, more nurturing environments for children and young people in foster care.
Protective Care provides clear guidance and practical tools to help fostering services:
Protective Care is not about removing risk from children’s lives. It is about helping the adults around them understand, manage and respond to risk in a way that is thoughtful, proportionate and centred on the child.
Protective Care includes guidance, examples and templates that can be used by fostering services and carers in day-to-day practice. The publication introduces three linked plans:
A plan for foster carers and members of their household to think about family routines, behaviour, boundaries and expectations, and how Protective Care can become part of everyday life.
An individual plan for each child, developed with the team around the child, which considers the child’s lived experience, strengths, needs, risks and the support they need to feel safe.
A proactive plan to help fostering families and services prepare for what practical and emotional support would be needed if an allegation is made, so decisions are not made in crisis.
Together, these plans help fostering services create a more consistent, child-centred and trauma-informed approach to Protective Care.
Fostering services have a vital role in helping carers understand and apply Protective Care. This includes providing training, policies, reflective supervision, guidance and support so foster carers are not left to manage complex decisions alone.
Protective Care can help your service support better conversations around:
By embedding Protective Care across your service, you can help foster carers feel more confident, children feel safer and teams work together more effectively.
Protective Care is essential reading for:
It is also useful for wider practitioners working with children and families, including teachers, health visitors and other members of the team around the child.
Protective Care gives fostering services a practical framework for supporting carers to provide safe, loving, trauma-informed care.
It helps services move away from blanket rules and towards a more confident, balanced approach that recognises each child, young person and fostering family as unique.
Buy Protective Care today and support your service to embed best practice across fostering households, supervision, planning and review.
Alongside the publication, The Fostering Network offers training to help fostering services understand Protective Care and embed it into practice.
Our training can help your team develop a practical understanding of the Protective Care approach, increase confidence in risk-sensible decision-making, and support more consistent practice across your service.
Find out more about Protective Care training below.