How we work with you
Quick overview
How we work with you
At Flourish, you have a connected team around you, providing personal, practical and specialist support throughout your fostering journey.
Your support includes:
One Flourish team
Our teams work together around you and your family, so you know who to turn to and never have to navigate fostering alone.
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Book a discovery chat with a member of our team at a time that suits you.
Support that feels joined up and personal
Fostering brings together ordinary family life and a professional responsibility for a child who may have experienced things that make relationships, trust and everyday situations more complicated.
There will be times when you need practical advice and times when you need someone to help you think through something more difficult. Sometimes you’ll need specialist insight. At other times, what you need is simply for somebody to answer a question, sort out some paperwork or make sure you know what happens next.
Our job is to make all of that support feel connected.
At Flourish, you have a team around you, but we don’t want that to mean navigating a long list of departments. We want you to know who your main people are and feel confident that the different teams involved communicate with one another.
From your very first conversation
For most people, the first person they meet at Flourish will be part of our recruitment team.
Their role isn’t to persuade you that fostering is right for you. It’s to understand what has brought you to the conversation, answer your questions honestly and help you think about whether fostering — and Flourish — could be right for your family.
If you decide to continue, you’ll meet more of the people who will support you through assessment and beyond. We want that process to feel like the beginning of a relationship rather than simply a series of checks you have to complete.
You’ll have plenty of opportunities to ask us questions too. Choosing the right fostering service needs to work both ways.
Your relationship with your Supervising Social Worker
Once you’re fostering, your Supervising Social Worker will be one of your closest professional relationships.
They’ll get to know you, your family and the child or young person you’re caring for. Regular supervision gives you space to talk openly about how things are going, reflect on challenges, recognise progress and consider what additional support might help.
Consistency is important to us. Good support is much easier when someone already understands your family and your journey, rather than asking you to start from the beginning every time something happens.
Your Social Worker is also connected to the wider Flourish team, so when something needs another area of expertise, you shouldn’t be left to work out where to go next on your own.
Your regional team and fostering community
Our Registered Managers and regional teams help keep Flourish personal and connected to the areas in which our foster families live.
They bring families together through training, support groups, events and activities, while also providing local leadership and making sure the wider support around each family is coordinated.
That local community matters. Having opportunities to meet other foster parents means being around people who understand the realities of fostering in a way that friends and extended family sometimes can’t.
It also means the people leading your service aren’t remote figures. We want you to know your local team and for them to know you.
Therapeutic expertise when another perspective would help
There will be situations where a child is struggling and it isn’t immediately obvious what they need.
Our in-house psychotherapists work alongside foster parents and social workers to offer specialist understanding of trauma, attachment, relationships and emotional development. They can help the wider team think about what may sit underneath a child’s behaviour and how the adults around them can respond in a way that strengthens safety and connection.
This isn’t about giving every difficulty a clinical label. Often it’s about helping everyone slow things down, look at the situation differently and understand the child’s experience.
Because our therapists work within Flourish, that specialist perspective can become part of the wider conversation rather than sitting separately from social work and family life.
Opportunities for children and young people through Aspire
The team around your family isn’t only there to support you as a foster parent.
Our Aspire programme focuses on our children and young people, creating opportunities for them to learn, grow, take part in activities and events and receive support that encourages their interests and development.
We want the young people growing up within Flourish families to have experiences they can enjoy and feel proud of. Their time in foster care may be one part of their story, but it shouldn’t be the thing that defines every opportunity available to them.
Aspire is part of our commitment to seeing the whole child: their strengths, interests, ambitions and potential as well as the challenges they may have experienced.
Practical support matters too
Not every problem needs a Social Worker or a therapist.
Sometimes you need to understand a payment, check an allowance, arrange training, ask about paperwork or get an answer about something practical.
Our placements, finance and administration teams are an important part of the support around foster families. Careful placement discussions help us think properly about whether a match is right for a child and a family, while efficient finance and administration reduce unnecessary pressure around the everyday responsibilities of fostering.
Those things might happen behind the scenes, but when they’re done well they make a real difference to family life.
Practical support matters too
Children don’t only need support during office hours, and difficult situations don’t conveniently wait until the following morning.
Flourish provides access to support 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so there is somebody available when something happens outside normal working hours and you need advice.
As one of our foster families explains:
Mark & Jenny
Flourish Foster Parents
"I know that if I woke up at two o'clock in the morning with a problem, I could pick up the phone and somebody from Flourish would be there to support us."
Knowing support is available doesn’t mean you’ll need to use it every night. It means knowing that when you genuinely need someone, you aren’t alone.
Different expertise, one Flourish team
Social workers, regional teams, therapists, Aspire, training, placements, finance, administration and leadership all bring something different to Flourish.
The important part isn’t how many teams we have. It’s how well those people work together around children and families.
We want foster parents to feel supported by people who know them, respect their experience and are prepared to work alongside them through both the rewarding and difficult parts of fostering.
Because foster parents are the people providing the everyday care, but they should never feel they’re carrying the responsibility on their own.
Change a child's life as a therapeutic foster parent.
Speak to us confidentially about fostering