What happens at fostering panel?

You have had the home visits. You have answered questions about your childhood, your relationships, your money and your health, and a social worker has written it all up into a report longer than anything anyone has ever written about you. Now there is a date in the diary and a group of people you have never met who are going to talk about whether you can care for someone else’s child.

Almost everyone finds this the most nerve-wracking part of becoming a foster carer. It is also the part agencies explain worst. So here is what actually happens on the day, who is in the room, what they can and cannot decide, how long the decision takes, and what your options are if the answer is not the one you wanted.

The short answer

A fostering panel is a group of people who read your assessment, meet you, and make a recommendation. They do not make the final decision. That belongs to one named person at your agency, called the agency decision maker, who has seven working days to make it once the panel minutes reach them.

Panel is not a test you can fail on the day. By the time you are invited, your assessing social worker already believes the answer should be yes, and the overwhelming majority of people who reach panel are approved.

What a fostering panel actually is

Panels are not something agencies invented to look thorough. They are required by law. The Fostering Services (England) Regulations 2011 require every fostering service, whether it is a council or an independent agency like ours, to keep a central list of people considered suitable to sit on a panel, and to constitute one or more panels from that list.

The chair matters more than most applicants realise. Under the same regulations, any panel chair appointed after 1 October 2011 must be independent of the fostering service. The person running the meeting does not work for the agency whose applicant is sitting in front of them. That is deliberate, and it is worth knowing before you start, because the person with the most authority in the meeting has no stake in whether the agency needs more carers this quarter.

Who is in the room

The regulations set a minimum. No panel business can go ahead unless the meeting includes the chair or one of the vice chairs, one member who is a social worker with at least three years of relevant post-qualifying experience, and three other members. So the smallest lawful panel is five people. In practice most are larger, somewhere between six and ten.

The rest of the membership is up to the agency, and good panels are mixed on purpose. Fosterline describes panel members whose backgrounds “may be in health or education, or they may have lived experience of fostering, adoption or related fields”. Many agencies produce a panel booklet introducing the members before the day. If yours does not offer one, ask for it.

The panel can also bring in expertise it does not have in the room. Regulation 25 allows it to obtain “such legal advice or medical advice as it considers necessary”, and the National Minimum Standards say at 14.6 that fostering panels have “access to medical expertise and legal advice, as required”. If something in your medical report needs interpreting, a doctor is asked. Nobody is guessing.

You will not be the only person there on your side, either. Your assessing social worker attends to present the report and answer questions, and usually your supervising social worker comes too if one has been allocated.

Where all these people actually are varies between agencies. Some panels still meet around a table; plenty now sit on a video call instead, and ours are held on Zoom. Nothing in the standards says where a panel has to meet, and none of your rights change either way.

How you get to panel in the first place

Since 2013 the assessment has run in two stages, and knowing which stage you are in tells you a good deal about where you stand. Our guide to what the fostering assessment involves covers the whole process; here is how the two stages feed panel.

Stage one is the checks. Your full name, address and date of birth, a medical report, an enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service check for every adult in the household, a consultation with the council for the area you live in, and interviews with your personal referees. The Department for Education’s statutory guidance says the decision on whether you have completed stage one “must be reached within 10 working days of all the stage 1 information being received”.

Stage two is the assessment proper, the part people mean when they say Form F. It covers your personality, your background and culture, your religious persuasion if you have one, and your previous experience of caring for your own and other children. The guidance allows stage two to be “obtained, and the assessment carried out, in parallel with stage 1”, which is why the two often feel like one long conversation rather than two separate hurdles. Somewhere in the middle of it you will do the Skills to Foster course, which is part of the training you complete before and after approval.

There is a deadline on the whole thing, and few people are told about it. Standard 14.4 of the National Minimum Standards requires the panel to make its recommendation on a prospective foster carer “within eight months of receipt of the prospective foster carer’s application to be assessed”. Eight months is the outer limit rather than the target. If yours is drifting towards it with no explanation, that is a reasonable question to put to your assessing social worker.

What the panel reads before the meeting

Everything. The assessment report, the references, the checks, the medical summary and anything else the agency holds. Standard 14.3 requires all of it to reach panel members “at least five working days in advance of the panel meeting to enable full and proper consideration”. Nobody is opening your file for the first time while you wait.

You should be given the report to read first, and you can write a response to it. If an agency has concerns and decides during stage two that you are not suitable, it can compile what the statutory guidance calls a “brief report” setting out the assessment done so far and its reasons, and you then have 10 working days from the notification to send your observations back. Those observations do not vanish into a drawer: the guidance is explicit that the report goes to panel “along with any observations submitted by the applicant”.

So read your report properly, and correct anything factually wrong, in writing, before the meeting. It is far easier to fix the wrong date of a house move on paper than to explain it live to nine people you have never met.

Do you have to attend?

You are entitled to. Standard 14.5 says foster carers and prospective foster carers “are given the opportunity to attend and be heard at all panel meetings at which their approval is being discussed and to bring a supporter to the panel if they wish”.

Two things in that sentence deserve a second read. You can be heard, so you are not there as an exhibit. And you can bring a supporter, who might be your partner, a friend, a grown-up son or daughter, or an experienced foster carer. Hardly anyone takes up the offer, mostly because nobody tells them it exists.

Attending is usually the better choice. The panel has read hundreds of pages about you, and fifteen minutes of you answering questions does more for your application than any paragraph of the report can.

What they ask

Panel questions are not designed to catch you out. They are there to check the assessment covered what it should have, and to hear your reasoning in your own words. Fosterline suggests preparing for “common questions such as why you want to foster, how you feel about continued training and how you work with others”.

In practice, expect some version of these:

• Why fostering, and why now. The honest answer lands better than the polished one.
• What your household thinks, including your own children if you have them, and who was consulted.
• What you would do at three in the morning when a child is distressed and you are exhausted.
• How you would work alongside a child’s parents, and alongside social workers you disagree with.
• What support you would ask for, and whether you would actually ask.
• Something from your own history that came up in the assessment, and what you have made of it.

One question trips people up more than any other, and it is a simple one: what age range and how many children do you feel able to care for? Have an answer ready, and make it an honest one rather than the widest one. Saying you could take anybody is not the impressive response people assume it is.

What the panel decides, and what it does not

This is the part most people misunderstand. Under regulation 25, the panel’s job is to consider your application and recommend whether you are suitable to be a foster carer, and to recommend the terms of that approval.

Those terms matter as much as the yes does. They set how many children you can care for at once, their age range, and sometimes the kind of care, whether that is short-term, long-term, parent and child or short breaks. It is worth reading up on the different kinds of foster care before your panel date, so the terms you agree to are the ones you actually want to live with.

But a recommendation is not a decision. It goes to the agency decision maker, a named senior person at the agency, and only they can approve you.

The agency decision maker, and the clock

Standard 14.9 gives the decision maker seven working days from receiving the recommendation and the final panel minutes to make “a considered decision that takes account of all the information available to them”. Fosterline puts the same rule more plainly: the final decision “will happen within seven working days of them receiving the minutes (notes) of the fostering panel meeting”.

Standard 14.10 then sets out how you find out. You are told orally within two working days, and written confirmation follows within five.

So the honest timeline for panel day runs like this. You will often get an indication of the recommendation before you log off, or by phone that afternoon. The decision that actually counts arrives within a fortnight or so. If two weeks pass with no word, give them a ring.

Deferral is not a no

Panels defer, and it happens more often than people expect. A panel may recommend deferring an item to return to panel within an agreed timescale, usually because a reference has not arrived, a check is outstanding, or a question came up that nobody in the room could answer without more information.

It is deflating on the day. It is not a verdict on you, and the usual outcome of a deferral is approval a few weeks later.

If the answer is no

Very few people reach panel and are turned down, but the route through it is worth knowing, because almost nobody explains it until it is already happening.

If an agency proposes not to approve you, it must give you written notice with its reasons. That notice is called a qualifying determination, which the Department for Education defines as “a proposed decision made by a fostering service provider that it does not consider someone suitable to foster”. Note the word proposed. Nothing is final at that stage.

From the date of that letter you have 28 calendar days, and two options. You can send written representations back to the agency, or you can apply to the Independent Review Mechanism for a review by a panel that has nothing to do with your agency.

Be clear about what that mechanism is, because the word review misleads people. In the government’s own words, it “is not an appeal and it cannot overturn the fostering service providers qualifying determination”. What it does is “make a fresh recommendation to your fostering service provider on your suitability to foster a child and/or the terms of your approval”. The minutes and the recommendation reach you 12 working days after the hearing, and your agency’s decision maker then makes the final decision taking that recommendation into account.

One limit is worth knowing in advance. If you are found unsuitable at stage one rather than stage two, the statutory guidance says plainly that “the applicant has no right to a review of this decision by the independent review mechanism”. The right attaches to the later stage.

You can also apply to a different agency, and you must tell them you applied somewhere before. Being open about a previous application is not a barrier. Hiding one is.

What happens straight after approval

Approval is not the finish line, and the week that follows is quieter than most people imagine. You sign a foster care agreement, you meet the person who will supervise you, and then you wait for the right child rather than the first child. Some carers wait days, some wait months, and the wait says nothing about you.

Panel is not a one-off event in your fostering life, either. Your first review will go back to panel or to a reviewing officer depending on the agency, and carers who move between agencies go back to panel as well, which is one reason transferring to a different fostering agency takes a couple of months rather than a couple of weeks.

If you want a picture of what sits around you once you are approved, our foster carer support pages set out the supervising social worker, the out-of-hours service and the training you do in your first year.

How South Coast approaches it

We will be honest about one thing. No agency can promise you a panel date before it has your references and checks in hand, and any agency that does is telling you what you want to hear. What we can do is keep you informed about where your assessment has reached, and tell you plainly what the hold-up is when there is one.

Before panel we go through the report with you rather than sending it over and hoping. You will know what is in it, you will have had the chance to correct it, and you will know who is likely to be there. If you would rather not attend, that is your right, though we will usually encourage you to.

One practical thing worth saying plainly: our panels are all held on Zoom. It takes a good deal of pressure out of the day. There is no drive to an unfamiliar building, no corridor to wait in, and you can sit at your own kitchen table with your notes in front of you. We send the joining link in advance and check it works with you beforehand rather than five minutes before you are due on.

The usual video sensibilities apply. Find somewhere quiet where you will not be interrupted, use a laptop rather than a phone if you have one, and join ten minutes early. If your connection drops, the panel waits. It happens often enough that nobody thinks anything of it.

You won’t have to do this alone

If you are earlier in all this, and still working out whether any of it applies to you, that is a better place to start than you think. Most of the worries people bring to a first phone call turn out not to be the obstacles they feared: being single, being over 55, renting, working, or living with a health condition. Most of the questions we get start with the words “can I foster if”, and most of the answers are yes.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a fostering panel spend on my application?

Usually between fifteen and thirty minutes, and you normally join for part of that rather than all of it. Panels consider several cases in a day, so you may be given a joining time rather than a fixed slot, and there is often a short wait before you are brought in.

Can I bring someone with me?

Yes. The National Minimum Standards give you the right to bring a supporter if you wish, and that can be your partner, a friend or a relative. Tell the agency in advance so the paperwork and the invitation account for them.

What should I wear?

Something you would wear to a school meeting about your own child. Panels are formal in structure and informal in tone, and nobody has ever been turned down over a jumper. On a video panel the same applies from the waist up, and it is worth checking what is behind you.

Is the panel in person or online?

It varies between agencies, and some still meet in person. South Coast’s panels are held on Zoom, so you can attend from home. Whichever way your agency runs it, you have the same right to attend, to be heard and to bring a supporter with you.

Will they ask about difficult things in my past?

If it is in the report, it may come up. Difficult histories do not rule people out. What a panel looks for is whether you understand the effect of what happened and can talk about it steadily.

Who makes the final decision?

The agency decision maker, a named senior person at the agency. The panel recommends, the decision maker decides, and Standard 14.9 gives them seven working days from receiving the panel minutes.

What happens if they say no?

You get written reasons, and 28 days either to send representations back to the agency or to ask the Independent Review Mechanism for an independent review. That review makes a fresh recommendation rather than overturning the original decision, and your agency’s decision maker makes the final call.

Please note: this article describes the law and standards for fostering services in England as they stand at the time of writing, drawing on the Fostering Services (England) Regulations 2011, the Fostering Services National Minimum Standards and Department for Education statutory guidance. It is general information rather than advice about your own circumstances, and your agency’s own policies will add detail on top of the legal minimums described here.