Evaluating Fostering Futures therapeutic fostering service through action research: bringing together evidence and value-based approaches to evaluation.

Working in a collaborative partnership with Fostering Futures Therapeutic Fostering Service, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR) has been undertaking a participatory action research project. Unlike conventional research, the aim is to build the research skills and capacity of the Fostering Futures team: to enable them to capture and critically examine their ‘vision’ of the service, as well as to measure the impact they have on the children and young people they care for.

The Fostering Futures Service helps fostered children and young people – one of the most vulnerable groups in our society – who have often experienced painful, unstable and chaotic beginnings to their lives. The emerging and innovative approach of Fostering Futures is to provide long-term and therapeutic foster care to support ‘hard to place’ looked after children in need of care: by building young people’s resilience against stressful experiences and allowing them to fulfil their potential.

You can read more about this presentation, given by Laura Stock, Ian Taberrer and Dr Dione Hills to the UK Evaluation Society, as well as listen to an audio recording of the talk and see the accompanying slide show here.