Types of Foster Care
Foster care aims to provide a safe, secure, and stable home environment for children and young people, who are not able to live with their own parents.
Sometimes children cannot live with their birth families or legal guardians and need to come into care. Before this happens, Tusla will always look to see if supports to families can help children to stay with their parents at home. Where this cannot happen, foster care is the preferred option of care.
Foster care can be provided by friends or relatives of the child, this is known as relative foster care or it can be provided by carers that the child does not know, this is known as general foster care.
General foster care
This is when a family in the community apply to become foster carers and are assessed and approved as carers for children they do not know.
Relative foster care
This is when a friend or relative of a child applies to become a foster carer and are assessed and approved as carers for children they are related to.
There are several types of foster care:
Emergency care
This is where a child comes into care or needs to move placement very quickly and is placed with ‘emergency carers’.
Short-term placements
These provide temporary care for a child separated from their birth family. After a while, the child may move back to their family or on to a long-term family. Short-term placements are placements planned to last for less than six months.
Long-term care
This is needed for children who are unlikely to be able to live with their birth family again and who, for a variety of reasons, cannot be adopted.
Many children in long-term care become so much a part of their foster family that they continue to live with them until their independence, just as the birth children of the foster family do. However, a child may still move back to their birth family from a long-term placement.
Long-term care is a placement planned to last at least six months. It must be approved by the Foster Care Committee.
Respite care
This is short-term care for a child. It supports the child, their parent or parents or foster carers by providing a break for the child and their primary caregivers.
Day foster care
This type of care provides a support system in the community. The child is in care for an agreed number of hours during the day but goes home each evening to the care of their parent’s. There is minimal disruption to family life, while the parents can obtain practical help, advice, and support from the foster carers.
Parent and child placements
Sometimes, an assessment shows that it is in the best interests of the child and parent that they remain living together but with the support of a foster carer in the foster carer’s home. In these circumstances the parent and child can both be in care OR the parent only maybe in care but caring for their own child who is not in care, OR the child can be in care and is being cared for by the foster carers and their parent is also living with the foster carers.
Pre-adoptive foster care
This is when foster carers care for children while they are awaiting adoption.
Note: foster care can change over time
The type of foster care placement can change over time without necessarily needing the child to move. For example, a short-term foster care placement can become a long-term foster care placement. This can happen if the needs of the child change over a period of time and the foster carers are willing to consider long-term foster care.
