Types of fostering

Ideal if you can offer flexibility and emotional resilience.

Short-term fostering means caring for a child for anything from a few days to a couple of years while decisions are made about their future.

Perfect for you if you are ready for a deeper, long-term commitment

Also known as permanent fostering, long term fostering is for children who can’t return to their birth families

Ideal for those who want to foster on a part time basis.

Short break carers typically support other foster carers.

Suits carers who are calm, adaptable and ready to respond quickly.

Emergency carers provide a safe place at short notice, often overnight or for a few days, when a child needs to be removed from their home urgently due to risk or crisis

Ideal for people who like a lot of energy in their home and are good at scheduling!

Fostering brothers and sisters who come into care together can be incredibly rewarding and uniquely challenging. It means keeping children together at one of the most difficult time in their lives, helping them hold on to the one constant they have: each other.

Ideal if you are already a full-time parent, or have grown up children still living at home so you don't have a spare room.

The majority of fostering requires you to have a spare room. However, you can foster babies up until their 3rd birthday if you are able to have a cot in your own bedroom.

For experienced carers with strong communication and mentoring skills.

Parent and child is one of our more specialised forms of fostering, usually (but not always), undertaken by experienced foster carers. You'll support both a parent and their child in your home, while professionals assess their ability to parent for themselves. You'll provide guidance and a nurturing environment for both.

Best suited for carers with experience or a background in care, education or health.

Family Link Plus (FLP) is the specialist scheme run by Gloucestershire County Council fostering service that offers daytime and overnight care to children with disabilities and complex health conditions.

Ideal if you want to make a real difference to young people with out the full expectations and commitment required for fostering.

Launch Pad is the supported lodgings scheme from Gloucestershire County Council designed to bridge the gap between adolescence and adulthood for children in care aged 16 – 17 years old. Launch Pad aims to recruit hosts with a spare room who can provide safe, supportive accommodation for these young people.

Ideal if you are emotionally resilient, trauma-informed and welcoming.

Sometimes called ‘Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children’ – this type of fostering is a deeply compassionate and rewarding role. These children have often fled war, violence, or persecution and arrived in the UK alone, without the care or protection of a parent or guardian. 

Stepping up to take care of loved ones.

Kinship fostering – also known as family and friends fostering – is when a child or young person is looked after by someone they already know and trust, such as a grandparent, aunt or uncle, older sibling, family friend, teacher or godparent. 

Is someone else's child living with you?

Private fostering is the name for an informal arrangement made by parents for a child to live with another family. 

We fully support young people in foster care who wish to ‘stay put’ with their carers past the age of 18. We pay a Staying Put allowance of £385.00 per week to facilitate this.