From Friday 15th July, the Orange Grove office based in Crowthorne has moved to Basingstoke, Hampshire, which will be more accessible to our carers and future applicants. Our new contact details are:

The London and West Regional Office,

Unit 28,

Basepoint Business Centre,

Stroudley Road,

Basingstoke,

Hampshire,

RG24 8UP

Telephone: 01256 406623

Joining the team at the new office will be newly qualified social worker Katie Spencer and new Regional Administrator, Martin Hiley.  Head of Service, Gill Horrobin, now also has a base at this office. The team are looking to expand their fostering recruitment within Hampshire and surrounding areas to continue to provide outstanding foster care placements for children and young people.

London and West

At Christmas we had a very convivial lunch with many of our established and new carers, the London and West team and our independent Form F assessors at the Waterloo Hotel, where we have our thriving support group monthly meetings.

Given our growing numbers of carers in the south of our region, we hope that a support group will be starting later in the year nearer to them, in addition to our monthly group in Crowthorne.

The New Year has seen Gill and Brian, and Emma and Stefan, approved as carers and we have other families going to panels in April and beyond.

In February, a ‘Skills to Foster’ 3 day course was run at our Crowthorne office, attended by 6 prospective carers who are starting on the road to fostering.

Carers have been invited to our training programme for 2011, including First Aid, People Skills, Safer caring and Communications which will be run at the Waterloo Hotel, very local to our office.

There will also be a Carer Conference in October near Warwick, which is a great opportunity to learn, meet other carers and support social workers from Orange Grove, and of course to socialise.

A Local Authority’s perspective on fostering

At our November support group we had the opportunity to meet Andrew Christie, Director of Children’s Services at Hammersmith and Fulham.  He came to talk about the challenges facing local authorities with their looked after children and it was very helpful to hear things form the local authority perspective. As foster carers and fostering social workers, we often see busy social workers, who are juggling their time between all the required paperwork and visiting the children – it often feels as though children are getting a poor service. Andrew came and heard about some of the problems and was able to talk about the pressures “from the other side”! There was also a useful discussion about Special Guardianship, a topic that will inevitably be raised more frequently next year in cases where children are placed long term in foster care.  Going for Special Guardianship is a huge decision for any foster carer and no two cases are the same – foster carers need support in weighing up the pros and cons of going for this option and should only do so if they feel confident that it is right for the child and for them as a family.

Andrew’s visit was a great success – it was useful and helpful for the carers who attended and he also very much enjoyed hearing about the experiences of our foster carers and the dilemmas they face every day.  Thanks to Andrew for giving up his time to join us and to the carers who came along.