It’s a sad truth that the care of looked-after children tends to surface in the national consciousness only as a result of reports that something has seriously gone wrong. And so it proved last week, with the suggestion that a child of Christian origin had been inappropriately placed in the care of a Muslim family. In the ensuing media furore, the judge took the rare decision to publish the case management order, which raised serious questions about the accuracy of the narrative pushed by some parts of the press.

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The pressures the foster care system is operating under are rarely accorded the same levels of attention. Children in the care system are some of the most vulnerable in society: six in 10 are there as a result of abuse and neglect. Three-quarters live in foster care placements. The quality and stability of those homes are critical in helping children cope with the adversity they have experienced. Yet there is a chronic shortage of foster carers – currently estimated at around 7,000 – which makes finding a stable placement for each child much more difficult.

Foster carers are also facing increasingly difficult conditions, which makes it harder for them to provide the support and care these children need. Carers are often expected to give up work or scale back hours in order to care for children with complex needs. Yet four in 10 foster carers surveyed by the Fostering Network say they receive no fee above the allowance to cover the costs of looking after a child and more than half said this allowance did not meet those costs fully. For those who received a fee, the median was £160 a week. But there is evidence that councils have been reducing these fees with little justification or warning.

Provision for respite from providing what is often very complex and emotionally taxing care is very patchy. Alarmingly, foster carers are not protected by whistleblower legislation and are often denied access to due process. According to one barrister, children can be removed from their care out of the blue, official reviews take place in secret and foster carers can be banned from working with children, again without recourse. While a child’s interests must always be put first, they are hardly likely to be served by carers too intimidated to speak out about alleged wrongdoing for fear of the consequences.

The poor conditions many carers face are a product of the no-man’s-land they occupy between quasi-parental volunteers and child professionals. What was once an informal and voluntary activity has over time developed into a professionalised and regulated system, driven by the increasing complexity of the needs of children being taken into care and recognition of the depth of the state’s responsibility.

The relationship between a foster carer and a child in their care cannot solely be characterised by the professional; the whole point is to provide love, attachment and relationship stability. Yet they have a professional relationship with children’s services. They are trained, supervised and accountable to the local authority; they must follow care plans and have personal development plans. They are expected to regularly attend meetings and work with specialist agencies and the birth family. One foster carer describes how she often stays up all night waiting for the police to visit when a child absconds from her care.

The Local Government Association has cautioned against the further professionalisation of foster care, arguing that offering better remuneration might attract the wrong person into foster care. This feels spurious: surely it is the job of vetting and selection procedures to ensure foster carers have the right motivations? This fear cannot be allowed to prevent foster carers being paid at a fair level. At the other end of the spectrum, unions representing foster carers argue that they should become employees. This would indeed give foster carers new rights that might prevent, for example, councils arbitrarily cutting back allowances. But there are surely risks that full professionalisation could undermine the very nature of foster care.

A failure to treat foster carers with the respect they deserve is undoubtedly having an impact on the quality of care provided for society’s most vulnerable children. There must be a concerted effort to improve the rights and conditions for carers in a way that is consistent with the unique status of foster care.