Ms Catherine Bond:

I will address Deputy Neville's question on the criteria for matching. My colleague from EPIC, Ms Karla Charles, will take the other questions.

The national standards for foster care require that children are matched to foster carers. Every child who enters foster care must have a care plan that outlines all aspects of his or her needs. Equally, foster carers who are approved through the foster care committees should have certain skills or expertise. They might be parents of mature, older children and have a lot of parenting under their belt. They might be parents of younger children with particular expertise in that. One is, essentially, matching the needs of the child with the skills of the prospective foster carers. Current regulations allow that a child is placed with foster carers and then a match is made. What we really need to see is the match happening before the placement occurs. If a child is coming into care in circumstances where we know his or her explicit needs and where we have a set of foster carers with the skills to meet those needs, this would be the optimum in terms of best practice. The reality is, however, that often there are not enough foster carers and there are children constantly coming into care. If we receive a child into care today under an emergency care order, he or she needs to be placed somewhere. The social work fostering team will see who has capacity today and see how, within the pool of capacity, the child's needs can best be met. Often the most immediate needs of the child relate to safety and security. The child is then placed with foster carers.

The matching process takes place at a later stage. The optimum for best practice would be that matching takes place before a child is placed. If one is looking for a long-term foster care placement, then one is looking at the long-term needs of the child. However, many children actually come into care on the basis of an emergency care order. Initially, it would be classified as a short-term placement but then move into long-term placement. If we have all the resources in place, then we can go for the best practice and go for the gold, but sometimes - on the day and in the moment - we must work with what we have. If we are working with what we have, then it is about identifying and discussing the needs of the child with the foster carers and discussing how best those foster carers can be supported in meeting the needs of the child. That might be by attending an additional training course or by higher levels of supervision and support from their link social worker. This is why it is critical that every foster carer has a link social worker. If they are experiencing stress in respect of a placement, the foster carers should be able to contact their social worker to discuss the problem and look to see how the foster family can meet the needs of the child.