The Effect of Foster Carer Training on the Emotional and Behavioural Functioning of Looked after Children

Abstract

The Foster Carers' Training Project was a three-year research project which examined the effect of training foster carers on the emotions and behaviour of the children they were looking after. The research produced useful quantitative findings, outlined in a paper recently published in Archives of Disease in Childhood (Minnis et al, in press), but the training itself also provided rich information about foster carers' communications and interactions with the children in their care. Helen Minnis and Clare Devine describe the training, the difficulties children presented, the communications which carers had to deal with and the empirical results of the research.