transitional carer
Bridgend County Borough Council’s foster care team is re-launching a new, specialist in-house foster care service.
The aim of the service is to work with children and young people who find it difficult to live within a family environment owing to their experience of trauma. We are looking to recruit carers who understand or who would be willing to undertake training to enable them to understand the full impact of trauma upon a child.
Carers would also need to work within an intense package of support to enable the child to regulate their emotions and transition to a stable long-term placement. This could be a move into long term fostering, returning to birth family or relatives or onto an independent living environment
The carers will be required to work alongside multi-disciplinary professionals, with additional mentoring and guidance from an experienced and knowledgeable carer household. Traumatic episodes will have affected upon the children in various ways, each child will display behaviours that reflect their individual circumstances:
- some will have experience of abuse and neglect
- some will have had multiple placement breakdowns
- most will have experienced emotional and relationship difficulties
- some will have adapted or learnt inappropriate behaviours to cope with their pain and trauma
- trauma may have impacted their learning and education
- a few will have be drawn into offending behaviour
- most will have mistrust of adults and have difficulty building healthy attachments
Placements are short-term, on average up to 24 weeks, during which time the carer will build a one-to-one relationship with the young person, showing commitment, patience and dedication to help them to overcome barriers that may have led to the breakdown of placements in the past.
