Foster Care Breakdown: A Study of a Special Teenager Fostering Scheme

Abstract

The overwhelming majority of children boarded out with foster parents are still at the younger end of the age range, but many public and voluntary agencies have established special placement projects to find families for adolescents, teenagers or other traditional “hard to place” groups. Anxiety of placements which “fail” is no less prevalent among this older group as the effects of disruption are perhaps more strongly felt. This paper is an empirical investigation into the factors which cause placements to fail in one such special fostering scheme: the Kent Family Placement Scheme (KFPS). Using routine monitoring procedures we explore the factors which are associated with, and predictive of, placement breakdown. A further aim has been to comment on the research methodology commonly used in previous breakdown research, which has rarely taken full advantage of the data collected. A description of the KFPS and a brief discussion of alternate measures of outcomes and definitions of breakdown are followed by an exposition of logit analysis — the methodology employed in this study. The results of these analyses — in which we successfully predict 79 per cent of placement outcomes — are reported under three heads: teenager characteristics, foster placement characteristics and child care practices. Implications for care practice are highlighted.