Barnardo’s Family Placement Service
Barnardo’s Family Placement Services is a voluntary fostering agency based in Edinburgh which has specialised in finding families for children considered ‘hard to place’ for over 20 years.
What does hard to place mean?
For a variety of reasons the children referred to us by local authorities have not been placeable within their own pool of foster families. This is usually because the child has additional needs of some kind. This may mean:
- a medical condition
- directly or indirectley affected by HIV/AIDS
- learning difficulties
- emotional difficulties
- delayed development
- emotional difficulties
- challenging behaviour
- physical disabilites
- specific cultural/religious needs
- or be one of a sibling group that need to be placed together
All these children will be challenging for different reasons and all will make demands on you and your family that can, at times, seem hard to manage. The reason our carers keep coming back for yet another child is that the rewards can equally be enormous as youngsters flourish and overcome their difficulties. Sometimes it feels like one step forward and two back as ‘progress’ is rarely straightforward, but these little advances over time make a huge difference to these youngsters lives and give them opportunities and choices for their futures, which they otherwise would not have.
We provide the following services:
- assessment and consultancy
- short term breaks
- bridge (temporary) fostering
- permanent fostering
- Rainbow Families: Finding the right families for Scotland's ethnic children
- Psychotherapy
We aim to:
- enable children to maintain meaningful links with their birth family and return to their care where appropriate.
- enable children who cannot return to their birth family to have a sense of belonging and continuity in their lives so that their identity and self-esteem can be enhanced.
- enable children to understand past experiences of abuse and be equipped to prevent further abuse.
- enable children to grow towards their full potential whatever their emotional or behavioural difficulties, learning or physical disabilities.
- enable children to live in a family environment that offers and promotes children's own racial and cultural identity and one that provides an understanding and acceptance of racial and cultural differences.
