Our names are Tony and James and we have been together for about ten years. We are in our 30s now and have always wanted to care for children. We had a good think about the best way to go about it, considered surrogacy and adoption but we wanted to have the support of an agency behind us – fostering was the way to go.
We were worried that because we had not worked with children or had our own biological children, that it might go against us, but the assessor was really reassuring and told us that we had a lot of transferable skills.
We got on renovating our house so it would be ready to be the perfect home for our foster children. We attended the Skills to Foster training which was really informative and helped us understand the needs of a young person who had experienced trauma. We also completed our first aid training and got to meet the person who would likely be our Family Support Worker, who was also a fellow foster carer.
We completed a report with our social worker. It was called a Form F which went through all our history, our support networks and looked at our strengths and where we might need support. We had homework to complete as well, but it was really interesting and made us want to foster even more.
We are ready for panel now and very excited…