Independent Fostering Providers: Predators Or Pioneers, Partners Or Procured?(Report‪)‬

Introduction The public sector was the almost exclusive provider of fostering placements for children in care in Britain for much of the second half of the 20th century (Pringle, 1998; Hendrik, 2005). Local authorities were generally able to recruit, approve and provide sufficient numbers of foster carers at a time when as many or more children in care were living in residential homes (Berridge, 1985; Sinclair and Gibbs, 1998; Bullock, 1999). Most of the fostered children were younger when they joined their foster families and many grew up in long-term care, when a care order deprived birth parents of all parental rights or responsibilities, short of opposing the adoption or emigration of their children (Thoburn, 1999). Those who were fostered tended not to have presented the difficulties described by Sinclair and his colleagues in their subsequent study of fostered children in seven local authorities, who: