Notts Outdoors has reserved three weekends next year exclusively for Nottinghamshire Fostering Families.  Hagg Farm is one of our residential activity centres near Ladybower in the heart of the Peak District National Park.

Many young people from Nottinghamshire schools will have visited Hagg Farm over the 33 years that the centre has been operating. Besides hosting school visits Hagg Farm can also be hired by groups and larger families for holiday/weekend accommodation and makes a fantastic base to explore villages like Castleton, Edale and Hathersage.

The John Hunt Base has four dormitory-style bedrooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms (one of which is wetroom style). The building is all on one floor and is fully accessible to wheelchair users. There is a combined dining/living room and bedding is provided. You can find out more about Hagg Farm by clicking the link at the end of this article.

Arrival is from 3pm on the Friday and departure by 3pm on the Sunday. The price to hire the John Hunt Base for NCC foster carers and their families is £350 for one family for a Friday to Sunday stay (self-catered). If two families who both foster for the council would like to stay on the same weekend, the price is £650 combined.

In addition, we are excited to share that Hagg Farm is offering a free full day of outdoor activities with an outdoor instructor on the Saturday. Families can choose two activities from climbing, high ropes, caving, a guided walk or stream scrambling. Activities are suitable for children aged seven and older. So you can book the weekend and just explore the Peak District with your family or have an instructor lead some adventurous activities for the day.

There are three weekends available during 2023 which have been reserved for foster carers and their families and are available on a first-come, first-served basis. The following weekends are currently available:

• Friday 21 – Sunday 23 April 2023
• Friday 5 – Sunday 7 May 2023
• Friday 19 – Sunday 21 May 2023

If you and your family would like to take advantage of this offer, please email haggfarm@nottscc.gov.uk or phone 01433 651594 as soon as possible to express an interest and include the weekend that you would like to book.

Hands up who has seen the 2022 John Lewis ad which portrays a fostering family getting ready to welcome a child into their home?

As you can imagine, this has created some media interest and is a really good opportunity for us to get fostering into the public eye.  One of our foster carers has already been interviewed on BBC Radio Nottingham and another couple took part in a Notts TV interview.

The recruitment team is working with John Lewis and are representing our service at the ‘My John Lewis’ evening shopping event at the Nottingham City John Lewis Store, today, Thursday 8 December, 6 - 9pm so if anyone is at the event please come and see us – we’ll be the ones with the Foster Notts banner 😊

With rising costs, grants up to £1,000 are now available for Nottinghamshire athletes who have represented their country at national events in the last 24 months, which includes a range of Sport England-recognised sports, from speed skating to swimming and from fencing to table tennis, and have until mid-December 2022 to apply.

Councillor John Cottee, Cabinet Member for Communities, said: “We are very proud of being able to continue to support our up-and-coming sporting talent. With rising prices, and the pressures of paying coaching fees, equipment and travel costs, this funding could go a little way to helping Nottinghamshire athletes strive for their dreams."

We hope that you are well and would like to use this festive newsletter as a means of saying thank you to you all for your care of our looked after children and young people. So many of you have agreed to care for children who had to move to residential homes and were ready to be cared for by a family this year and have agreed to care for children who need extra time and attention, thank you.

There have been so many good news stories shared at meetings in relation to our looked after children, not just about going to university or getting a job but stories such as children attending school without feeling anxious, or those who have built up enough confidence to attend a youth group.

Our commitment to being a therapeutic fostering service continues and we hope to have delivered the Foster Care Promoting Resilience and Recovery through Therapeutic Relationships training to all of our foster carers by the end of February 2023.  Further training is being developed to build on the skills and knowledge you have already learned.

We have continued to recruit and welcome new foster carers and we hope that you will welcome new carers to your local hub meetings. I am also pleased to say that the attendance at FLAG meetings has improved over this last year, meeting on Teams has provided more of an opportunity to you all wherever you live to join in and I hope that you will continue to do so in the new year.

During this year we have also been able to get back to face to face events, starting with a fun evening at Fostering’s Got Talent in May with lots of brave and talented acts.  The Long Service Celebratory Lunch followed, where we celebrated significant milestones of 25 years plus and the Sons and Daughters event which was well attended with a chance to let off steam and have a fun packed busy day.

We were also pleased to see a fantastic turn out at the recent Foster Carer Conference at Mansfield Civic Suite, and we received excellent feedback about the event, it was lovely to get the opportunity to meet so many of you in person. We also had good fun and again it was great to see so many of you all at this event.

We would like to wish you all a merry and peaceful festive period, and a happy new year.

It is a pleasure to include our traditional roll of honour for our foster carers who have reached one of the significant five-yearly long-service milestones during this year. 

As you may know the council has a quality and improvement team which manages the audit activity across children’s services, including the fostering service. We work together to ensure the quality of all our practice, whether the role is foster carer or social worker.

But what exactly is an audit and what does it do for the fostering service?

An audit is a list of fixed questions which are designed to measure the quality of something.  The questions are applied to a randomly selected group of children or families. The auditor completes the questions after reading records and speaking with people who are involved in the team around the child.

The fostering service runs audits twice a year.  If you’re randomly selected, you’ll be contacted by an auditor. Those selected will be asked to share their experiences of the service you receive from us, as well as your role with the child or young person you foster. They’ll also share their thoughts with you individually on what they find.

Audits are an important way of ensuring children are safe and practice is at the expected level. They provide a wealth of information about individual and collective qualities of practice. And they ensure we know where we need to continuously improve or take specific action. Thank you in advance to those foster carers selected for cooperating with the quality improvement team. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch with your social worker.

Recently we had the opportunity to hear Dr Karen Treisman MBE, clinical psychologist and author, talk about the power of language.  Dr Treisman has extensive experience in the areas of trauma, parenting, adversity, child protection, fostering, and attachment.

She talks about the importance of good relationships when healing trauma, and the importance of the interactions we have with children.

She shared some resources with us including a number of free resources available on her website: Adversity, Culturally, Trauma-Informed, Infused, & Responsive Organisations & Systems | Safe Hands Thinking Minds

We’d also like to share Dr Treisman’s TedTalk on the importance of good relationships because it is really relevant to you as foster carers.

Last but not least, we have spotted that some of the books she writes for children are available in local libraries around the county, so you can have a look for free. They might just help a child you are caring for!

We hope you find this info helpful and interesting. Don’t forget to log any training hours and reflect on it with your social worker.

An urgent safety alert has been issued by the government regarding the use of self-feeding and prop-feeding pillows for babies.  They have been found to present a risk of serious harm or death from choking or aspiration pneumonia.  Any use of them should be stopped immediately and the item disposed of safely.