About Ikon Fostering

Ikon Fostering aims to provide loving and nurturing foster homes for children who are unable to live with their birth families. Ikon Fostering is committed to the development of children, to help achieve their potential and to build resilience, in order to overcome any loss and trauma they may have experienced in the past.

Ikon Fostering will endeavour to provide:

• A service where children come first, in terms of our thinking and planning as well as their achievements;
• Foster homes where children feel they belong rather than placements in a care system;
• Foster carers who are fully prepared, supported, supervised and trained in their role;
• Foster homes which provide stability and security to children;
• Foster homes which promote a child’s positive sense of their own identity – including their culture, religion and ethnicity – respecting the child’s origins in every aspect of the care provided;
• Foster homes which promote contact where appropriate for the foster child;
• Foster homes which help the foster child make sense of their past;
• Foster homes which actively promote the child’s education and learning, including celebrating their hobbies and talents;
• Foster homes which actively promote the child’s health, including mental health;
• Foster homes which help children understand and manage risks for themselves;
• Foster homes which actively prepare the young person for adulthood, at a pace and style that the young person can absorb;
• Foster homes which are carefully matched with the needs of the child;
• Foster homes which children leave, whenever possible, in a planned way or, when this is not possible, which help foster children to understand why they had to leave unexpectedly;
• Social Worker supervision that takes a robust approach to poor practice, challenging foster carers to provide the high-quality care that children deserve;
• A service which takes its safeguarding seriously, both in terms of the recruitment of foster carers and staff and also in terms of involving statutory agencies appropriately when issues of concern come to light (in line with Working Together 2015);
• A collaborative approach to care planning with the responsible authority, supporting the development of an up-to-date and child-focussed care plan for each child, ensuring a clear pathway to permanence is achieved as quickly as possible.

With the purpose of meeting these aims and objectives, Ikon Fostering provides the following services:

• An ongoing programme of group activities and individualised direct work provided by our Senior Therapeutic Support Worker
• Foster homes drawn from a range of cultural and religious communities, reflecting the needs of the communities we serve;
• Foster homes able to care for children of different ages;
• Foster homes able to keep siblings together when needed;
• Foster homes where the child is the only child (sometimes known as solo placements);
• Foster carers able to contribute towards the ongoing assessment of each foster child, supporting the development and review of the child’s care plan as appropriate;
• Foster carers will have the opportunity to be trained in order to care for children with complex health needs
• Foster carers will also have the opportunity to be trained for parent child placements

To monitor the quality of the services outlined above, Ikon Fostering uses the following three routes:

• Case records;

  • All the case records completed by Ikon Fostering staff are monitored by the registered manager or an appropriate member of staff on a regular basis, with action taken to address any shortfalls. All foster carer records are signed off and monitored through regular supervision provided by supervising social worker.

• Scrutiny of the fostering panel;

  • It is the role of fostering panel to make recommendations about the approval status of foster carers.  Each fostering panel is required to have an independent chair. Ikon Fostering is committed to ensuring that fostering panel takes a balanced but robust approach to its independent scrutiny role and that the panel provides independent feedback on the quality of all the reports it considers.

• The voice of the child.

  • The voice of child is carefully listened to as evidenced in the Looked after Child Review, the Foster Carer Review and one-off consultation events and questionnaires regularly developed by Ikon Fostering. Ikon Fostering challenges itself each year to demonstrate the difference that seeking the views of children has made to our services.

In addition to the methods outlined above, outcomes for the service as a whole are measured in the following areas:

• Educational attainment and attendance;
• Placement stability;
• Number of complaints and allegations;
• Number of incidents of children going missing from care;
• Number of accidents or other noteworthy incidents involving foster children;
• Number of children with an up-to-date care plan and placement plan.

If you know someone who needs this Statement of Purpose in another language or format, please also let us know.

If you have a complaint or concern about Ikon Fostering, we would very much like to hear from you. It is only by listening to concerns and complaints that we can improve. Always feel free to contact Madhuri Pattni, the Registered Manager at Ikon Fostering, on 01922 618790 or email madhuri.pattni@ikonfostering.org . We will ensure that your complaint or concern is responded to appropriately and, if necessary, investigated independently.

Please note that this Statement of Purpose has been drafted to take account of the expectations of the National Minimum Standards, Statutory Guidance and Regulations for Fostering Services issued in April 2011 as well as the amendments to the Statutory Guidance in 2013 and The Care Planning and Fostering (Miscellaneous Amendments) (England) Regulations 2015

As set out in Standard 16.2 this Statement of Purpose is child-focussed, setting out how the aims and objectives of the service will meet outcomes for children.  It sets out the principles underpinning the service.  It explicitly does not set out details of the processes, procedures and structural information demanded by the superseded 2002 standards, all of which are available upon request.

As demanded by Standard 16.1 this Statement of Purpose is made available to foster carers, staff and children.  A version of this Statement of Purpose is incorporated into the children’s guide.

As demanded by Regulation 3(2) of The Fostering Services (England) Regulations 2011, this Statement of Purpose is made available to the parents of foster children and prospective foster carers.