Can I foster as a disabled person?

Yes! We encourage disabled individuals and couples to foster with Southampton City Council.

Having foster carers with different skills, knowledge, and life experiences is important. Our children and young people are from a wide variety of backgrounds with different reasons for being in care.

There is still a myth that being disabled may affect your ability to care for another person. We know that this is not true.

Will I face more challenges in the fostering assessment?

We treat all prospective foster carers equally. We focus on your ability to provide a safe and nurturing environment to child or young person. This is regardless of your disability status.

As part of your assessment, we will invite you to have conversations about your journey in terms of your disability. We aim to understand the wider context of your parenting capacity, resilience, and your support network. This helps us to understand your strengths and how you can use them to support vulnerable children and young people.

Your disability is only one part of who you are. We will only share information as necessary within the assessment process with clear and informed consent. We appreciate that conversations about your disability may be difficult. It is important for us to understand your experiences of parenting. We will explore these with sensitivity.

Our assessment process uses frameworks that allow us to consider the impact of discrimination. We also consider how we can best support applicants through these things during their fostering journey.

What support will I have access to when I start fostering?

You will have access to a supervising social worker. They will be trained to understand your condition. They will work with you so that you can support a child in your care.

We run quarterly Fostering Forums for our foster carers. These enable us to better understand how we can improve. We use this feedback to develop sustainable actions to implement. We will not always get it right, but we are committed to gaining a better understanding of the needs of our foster carers.

Find out more about the support we offer.