Month: May 2025

On a recent weekday morning, Carla, the therapeutic development officer at the Ofsted-outstanding Progress Fostering Service, posed the question that frames every support session she runs: Who is this child beyond the label?

“Every child is completely individual, regardless of their background and needs,” she regularly tells foster carers when they gather during one of her several sessions with them, at Progress House, elsewhere or online.

That premise, that diagnoses illuminate but do not define, has guided Progress as it navigates a surge of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). The number of such referrals has doubled since the pandemic, stretching Britain’s 56,000‑strong fostering network.

To meet the demand, Progress leverages the Solihull Approach, a 12‑week programme that Carla leads several times a year. When carers first hear the length, she said, “they usually think, Twelve weeks? That’s a long time.” But by the final session, the mood shifts. “It’s a celebration of how far they’ve come,” she added, noting the friendships that form around the homework tasks of quiet observation and written reflection.

The core lesson is disarmingly simple: notice your own state before responding to a child. “Breathe, just take a moment first,” Carla tells carers confronting meltdowns in soft‑play centres or frantic school‑run departures. “If you’re hyped up, the child is going to mirror that.”

Foster carers say the advice helps. “It’s like first aid for the brain,” one participant volunteered after the session, comparing the pause to the stop‑and‑assess mantra taught on emergency‑response courses.

Progress is also piloting the Berry assessment, a structured questionnaire that tracks how a child behaves at school versus at home. “It really breaks down and looks at the areas of need,” Carla said. When the answers diverge sharply, she convenes a team‑around‑the‑child meeting to recalibrate support plans.

The method has already revealed masked anxiety in two children and led to tweaks in classroom seating and playground routines. “You can’t fix everything,” Carla cautioned, “but you can reduce the curve balls.”

Teaching the art of rupture and repair

The course spends a full session on what clinicians call rupture and repair—the cycle of conflict and reconciliation common in any family, but especially acute when past trauma shadows the dinner table. Foster carers, Carla said, possess something professional training cannot supply. “They’ve got the biggest hearts, and that’s something you can’t teach.”

She tries, instead, to give them language. One exercise asks carers to juggle an unexpected demand, mimicking the sensory overload a child might feel. “That’s how your child feels,” she tells them afterward.

Progress, which marks its 25th anniversary next month, now supports numerous fostering households. It hosts children’s clubs, support groups and impromptu phone triage, “Can I just have two minutes?” is a common request, to keep placements afloat between formal appointments.

The agency’s culture, Carla said, is summed up in the phrase she repeats to nervous newcomers: “We’re a family, and you’re part of it now.” Her message for the anniversary echoes that refrain. “Keep doing what you’re doing. Everyone is amazing, especially the children,” she said.

Britain must recruit an estimated 8,000 additional foster carers to meet current demand, the Fostering Network says. Many of the hardest‑to‑place children carry complex diagnoses. Progress’ blend of clinical insight and kitchen‑table pragmatism offers one model for how agencies can prepare carers for that reality — and, in the process, remind them to breathe.

At a corner in the Progress Head Office that provides a typical living room setup, Ms. Gill rehearses the ritual that has shaped her days for a quarter‑century with her supportive husband beside her. “Soon as they come in from school, everyone sits,” she says, tapping the surface. “One and a half hours of study time. Every single day.”

The routine explains much about why former foster children still telephone the Gills years later, sometimes from university dormitories. One young man, now studying engineering at the University of Birmingham, recently rang to say her insistence on homework had paid off. “You were right, Musti,” he told her, using the Punjabi word for aunt. 

The Gills are no ordinary foster carers. They joined Progress Fostering Service in June 2000 after being made aware of the rising shortage of culturally sensitive placements in the West Midlands. Six months later she and her husband enrolled on Progress’ very first training course. “When we started, we didn’t know what fostering is,” she recalled. “But we never looked back.”

Since then the couple — known to staff and children simply as “the Gills” have provided homes to more than a dozen young people, some for a night, others for the better part of childhood. They easily described three long‑term stays that alone add up to 30 years of care: a 10‑year placement for a girl who used a wheelchair, and 12 years for two siblings.

Their first assignment, in 2001, all but defined the road ahead: a six‑year‑old boy with profound autism who could neither speak nor sleep. “We had to nail the windows shut,” Mr. Gill said, still incredulous. The ordeal, Ms. Gill added, “built our foundation really solid so we could look after any child.”

Progress now has numerous staff members and works with several fostering families across and beyond the Midlands. But the Gills’ front room remains one of its unofficial situation rooms, a place where social workers drop in unannounced and plates of vegetarian samosas materialise for anyone who looks hungry. “Everybody’s so friendly,” Mr. Gill said. “That’s why we never gave up.”

The commitment has not been cheap. Early on, the couple remortgaged their house to fund vehicle adaptations and ceiling hoists. Nights out disappeared; holidays became logistically fraught. Yet Ms. Gill insists no child in her home should expect less than her own two sons, both graduates of University of Oxford. “If we can do it for our children,” she said, “they’re not different.”

The belief in education runs deep. When a teenager arrived two years ago, flunking classes and nursing a drinking habit, Ms. Gill bought her a corkboard and desk. Within months the girl collected top grades and a place at Leicester University. Another former charge, now 26, sends Christmas cards addressed to “Mum and Dad.”

Such outcomes underscore the theme of Foster Care Fortnight 2025, which began this week and seeks to recruit additional carers nationwide. Britain’s fostering network has contracted by 1 percent each year since 2021, according to the Fostering Network, even as the number of children entering care has risen.

For the Gills, the solution is neither policy detail nor pay scale but people. “Any child can thrive when they know someone believes in them,” she said, just as the couple has been doing since 2001.

Start your fostering journey today. Inquire about fostering at Progress. Visit progresscare.co.uk/fostering or call us on 01902 561066

Foster Care Fortnight 2025 invites us to celebrate The Power of Relationships, those everyday bonds that help children in care feel safe, seen and supported. For Progress foster carer Tom, relationship‑building starts with a games controller as often as it does with a cup of tea.

Tom grew up in care himself. After a stint working in a bank he began volunteering, discovering a passion for being a consistent adult presence in young people’s lives. “I didn’t realise that I could use my own background for positivity,” he recalls. That realisation drew him into residential children’s homes and eventually to fostering with Progress.

Whether he was visiting a boy who moved through five foster placements or helping a four‑year‑old who expressed frustration by head‑butting the floor, Tom learned that expertise matters less than authenticity and consistency. “It’s just trial and error… you’re not going to get it right every time, but you’ll have people to support you,” he says. 

Tom has been a gamer since childhood and keeps up with new releases so he can talk knowledgeably and critically about them with the young people he supports. “Gaming is as much a hobby for kids these days as playing football was for us,” he explains. Knowing what’s inside a title like Grand Theft Auto helps him set sensible boundaries: “You don’t want someone playing GTA ten hours a day, but equally you don’t want them doing it behind your back.”

Playing together also dissolves the first‑meeting awkwardness. The night Tom was introduced to one teen they loaded a stick‑man brawler onto the console. Tom won the opening round—“the only game I’m going to beat you at,” the lad groaned—but the shared laughter melted nerves and opened a conversation that would later include school stress, friendships and feelings. Today their Fortnite show‑downs are legendary: the young person’s lightning‑fast building skills versus Tom’s tactical map sense.

Planned transitions, purposeful relationships

Tom’s current placement is a 16‑year‑old who moved from a children’s home to live with him. A one‑page profile highlighted that the boy supports Aston Villa, so does Tom, and that simple common ground kick‑started the transition. Over six weeks they built familiarity through day visits and sleep‑overs. “For the fact that this could be the next four years of his life, three years of his life at my house, that’s not long at all—but it was the right amount of time,” Tom reflects.

Now the pair navigate GCSEs, match days and future pathways together. Tom’s priority is ensuring he leaves with confidence, skills and the knowledge that he always has a home to return to.

Tom believes colleagues from residential care, education and health already possess the relational toolkit fostering demands. “You’re going to share in the success of a young person going from childhood to adulthood, with all the extra stuff they’ve got going on,” he says. Progress’s culture helps, too: it “doesn’t make you feel like just a number—I know my name is known.” 

Whether it’s analysing a tricky boss level together or debating which Premier League team will finish top six, Tom turns shared interests into trust, routines into resilience and hobbies into lifelong skills. His story reminds us that the power of relationships often lies in the ordinary moments—a controller passed across the sofa, the triumphant shout after a hard‑fought win, and the quiet knowledge that someone will be there tomorrow, ready to press Start again.

As we mark Foster Care Fortnight 2025, Tom’s message is clear: if you have a spare room, a passion to connect and maybe a favourite game or two, you already hold the most powerful tool a foster child could ask for—a relationship that levels them up for life.

Start your fostering journey today. Inquire about fostering at Progress. Visit progresscare.co.uk/fostering or call us on 01902 561066