I’ve seen importance of foster care over years

YOUR article highlighting the need for foster carers (“Could you provide loving, long-term foster home?”, Mercury, December 27) prompted me to write this letter.

As a former social worker and then a manager in social services, I knew for many years how important foster carers are to this country.

Theirs is not headline, glamorous work that can readily attract acclaim.

Rather, it is work of care, offered privately and persistently: it can involve challenges that many of us never experience.

Since retiring I have continued slightly to witness the contributions that fosters carers make.

Friends living locally have offered countless children their love and care, and other friends and family members do the same, one through long-term fostering, another through adoption.

Collectively we might argue that all these people contribute to the idea of our living in a “civilised” society: one in which children who cannot live with birth parents, whether in the short or longer term, can have a family life.

I remember that the Mercury covered one such foster couple back in July - Louise Ross-Foden and John Dauncey-Foden.

That story was fascinating and uplifting, being about two police officers coming across youngsters who were accused of crimes and needed accommodation.

The couple saw beyond the behaviour to the troubled lives that led to the offences.

Their response, to apply to foster in order to help, cut across any stereotypes we might have about police officers almost needing to lack empathy to survive their tough jobs (actually, I have two ex-police officer friends who also are nowhere near that stereotype!).

Let’s hope that the local childcare agencies get good responses to the Mercury item, such that children can have access to the quality of love and care that the people mentioned above are giving – and that people who do become foster carers get the rewards that my friends clearly do.

Les Gallop, Leicester