Complex ‘everyday’ lives meet multiple networks: the social and educational lives of young children in foster care and their foster carers

Abstract

The everyday lives of young fostered children are rarely studied. Using an ethnographic approach including interviews, walks, observation and photomap making, this article reports on the findings from a unique pilot study of the social and educational lives of young foster children (aged 0‒4) in an inner London borough. The following findings are presented: (1) what foster carers do: everyday lives and education; (2) foster carers’ meanings and perspectives on early education; and (3) foster carers as ‘everyday experts’ in meeting complex needs. The findings demonstrate how foster carers fulfil multifaceted roles as they navigate complex everyday life with their young children. Ways in which foster carers may provide a ‘stimulating’ environment and the barriers and difficulties they encounter are discussed.

Keywords

Young children foster care foster carers education everyday life ethnography

Introduction

The research literature on young fostered children is sparse. Where it does exist, it is focused on problems, such as aggressive behaviour or lack of attachment, and not on what foster carers can do to promote children’s development and enjoyment of life (Biehal, et al., 2010; Wildeman and Waldfogel, 2014). Alongside this is persistent evidence of the educational under-achievement of children in care and its long-term impact on life chances, well-being and life-course outcomes (Cameron, Connelly and Jackson, 2015; Connelly and Furnivall, 2013; Jackson, 2001; 2007; Jackson and Cameron, 2012; Jackson and Höjer, 2013). Moreover, the vast majority of the literature on education and children in care is focused on older children, and young children in foster care have been overlooked in both policy and research (Jackson and Hollingworth, 2017).

Given that the early weeks and months of life are a time of rapid learning and brain development (Gray, 2010; Jackson and Hollingworth, 2017), we suggest that there is an urgent need to understand more about the educational lives of young children in foster care. Jackson and Hollingworth (2017: 360) posit that we ‘cannot afford therefore to treat babies and toddlers as passive objects for whom it is sufficient to provide basic physical care. This is especially true for children in foster care who will usually have had a poor start in life.’ Foster care, whether short- or long-term, has the potential to contribute to children’s educational and social development and longer-term outcomes, particularly in the early years. The research on which this article draws was a first step towards addressing the lack of knowledge about young fostered children’s educational and social lives with a view to building practice capacity in caring for looked after children.

Early childhood education and young children in foster care

The upbringing of young children is highly sensitive to educational processes due to their developmental stage. Across the world, societies are investing in early childhood education and care systems to complement parental upbringing and optimise children’s development (Miller, et al., 2017). In England, early childhood education and care (ECEC) can take a number of forms including nursery schools and classes, full- or part-time day care in nurseries, sessional preschools and home-based care with registered childminders. All ECEC providers must offer the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum. There are also children’s centres, which are very largely targeted on programmes to support parents to encourage early learning (Jackson and Forbes, 2015). High quality ECEC makes a difference to children’s outcomes throughout their time at school and beyond and there are conspicuous ‘catch-up’ gains for children from disadvantaged backgrounds (OECD, 2017; Smith, et al., 2009; Sylva, et al., 2010). Children who are looked after in foster care are among the most disadvantaged in England. This group consists of about 13,000 children aged 0‒4 years (Department for Education, 2017a), many of whom have developmental delay and a range of social, psychological and behavioural needs (Vasilevva and Petermann 2016; Ward, Munro and Dearden, 2006), which may influence their later educational participation and attainment in school. Therefore, the provision of ECEC is crucial for young fostered children’s development (Lipscomb and Pears, 2011; Mathers, et al., 2016; Meloy and Phillips, 2012), but preliminary studies suggest that children of preschool age in foster care do not attend ECEC at the same rate as other children (Mathers, et al., 2016).

UK government guidance stipulates that fostering services have the role to promote a ‘stimulating environment’ in fostering households to support the development of children’s ‘emotional, intellectual, social, creative and physical skills’ (Department for Education, 2011: Standard 7.1). Foster carers, then, have a broadly educational role in the everyday lives of and interactions with young fostered children as well as facilitating access to more formal ECEC provision. Despite this important developmental role, we know very little about how foster carers go about educating these children, nor what kind of social lives the children have. Foster care in England is usually a temporary living situation until a permanent solution is found, either through adoption or return to birth families. Only a quarter of looked after children are fostered for a year or more (Narey and Owers, 2018). However, it now takes an average one year and 11 months from entry to care to adoption, so young children may spend many months in foster care (Department for Education, 2018).

Alongside a stimulating environment, foster carers should provide a nurturing, sensitive and stable home to help children in local authority care overcome early adversity and promote attachment security (Lang, et al., 2016; Mathers, et al., 2016). Foster carers may have a positive influence over children’s educational attainment (Mathers, et al., 2016; Pears, et al., 2010). However, carers in general appear to be less involved than they might be in their children’s education (Mathers, et al., 2016), possibly due to frequent placement transitions, lack of awareness about the provision of early education and limited information about the availability of special services (Pears, et al., 2010). In practice, foster carers help young children access educational activities through taking them to sessional activities such as playgroups, going to parks and providing them with toys and stimulation at home. The ‘stimulating environment’ for young children underpins what we refer to as the ‘educational and social lives’ of young children in foster care. This incorporates the whole environment, following research evidence from ECEC on high quality services (e.g. Mathers, et al., 2016), and reflects our interest in how physical, social and emotional conditions combine to facilitate children’s development. The term ‘stimulating environment’ includes resources such as basic welfare requirements (e.g. health, safety and appropriate supervision) and experiences such as caring and nurturing relationships, and reflects how the social and pedagogical are linked together, for instance, how early learning is embedded in relationships with adults and peers, and the quality of social interactions and support for learning (Mathers, et al., 2016). We outline below how the stimulating environment was measured (see ‘Outline of the study and methods’ section).

Ethnography, foster care and the ‘everyday’

Researching foster care means investigating the family and work lives of carers whose professionality is ambivalent. Foster carers work with and look after children whose birth families cannot, for a variety of reasons, care for or bring them up. Accustomed to being assessed and monitored, and also responsible for the intimate details of care and education, foster carers’ expertise and practice straddles the informal and the formal (Nutt, 2006), presenting challenges for researching their practice. Researchers of everyday life note the invisibility of the ‘habitual’ (Phoenix, et al., 2017), and that exploring the habitual in family homes, typically a private space where the normative or routine is largely unarticulated (Phoenix, et al., 2017), is particularly difficult. Data collection methods such as interviews risk omitting what might be taken for granted. Moreover, observations are difficult to negotiate in the private, informal and domestic setting of family homes, particularly those, like foster care households, that are subject to more overt surveillance by official agencies. Foster carers are offering their home and their care as an exemplar of ‘ordinary’ family life to children whose lives to date have been extraordinary (Berrick and Skivenes, 2012). ‘Ordinariness’ tends to be invisible and taken for granted, while foster carers are required to document both the routine and the exceptional in children’s lives, in part for the purposes of scrutiny by courts (Department for Education, 2011).

Ethnography, as a study of interactions, behaviours and perceptions (Reeves, Kuper and Hodges, 2008), is a promising approach to studying everyday life in foster care but has been little attempted, especially where the focus is younger children (Cunningham and Diversi, 2013; Schelbe and Geiger, 2017; Wildeman and Waldfogel, 2014). It requires a researcher to be ‘embedded’ with their participants or in a given site for a sustained period of time (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). It involves the researcher ‘burrowing into the social relationships of a specific local social world and revealing at least some of its internal dynamics and layers of meaning’ (Riain, 2009: 289).

Multiple methods for data collection are typically used in ethnographic studies and include participant observation, focus groups, and written and visual materials. Ethnographies are ‘flexible’ and provide the researcher with the space for adaptability in the context in which the study’s participants are located (Bassey, 1999; Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007) but also require sensitivity to the relationship between researcher and participants. They typically involve the researcher observing ‘real life’ situations, writing extensive field notes, following a group and taking part in what is going on in that setting, which generates ‘thick description’ (see Reeves, Kuper and Hodges, 2008).

For this study, we adopted an ethnographic approach to understand how the habitual, routine ‘everyday’ carries significant importance, potentially showing us how ideologies of care, parenting and education are embedded in everyday practices. We set out to explore how the everyday in routines and habits helps us to identify the facilitators, barriers and limitations to providing good early education in a foster care environment. Our study draws on a growing body of scholarly work exploring the practice of ‘everyday’ life in families (e.g. Phoenix, et al., 2017). Scott (2009) suggests that because everyday life is often seen as trivial, it can be easily forgotten and omitted from research, yet it is important as it comprises the ways in which people typically act, think and feel on a daily basis. In family practices, everyday life encompasses the mundane, routine, habitual or ‘normal’ things we do (Morgan, 2013). However, the process of understanding the everyday can be methodologically challenging. Interviews alone cannot sufficiently capture it. Hitchings (2011) suggests that ethnographic and particularly, observational approaches are often seen as better suited to studying the everyday and that interviews can be useful for exploring daily lives and practices alongside other methods (Phoenix, et al., 2017).

We draw on interviews, observation, shadowing and photo data during multiple visits, as influenced by two methodological traditions. The first is Alison Clark’s (2005) ‘Mosaic approach’ in ECEC settings, which she describes as the ‘bringing together of different pieces or perspectives in order to create an image of children’s worlds, both individual and collective’ (p. 31). This approach combines established methods such as observation and interviewing with innovative participatory tools. In her studies, children used cameras to document what they thought was important in their ECEC spaces and took the researcher on a tour of the setting. In addition, they were asked to make maps using their photographs and drawings. Each tool forms one piece of the ‘mosaic’ (Clark and Statham, 2005). Secondly, we draw on Phoenix and colleagues’ (2017) study of everyday family practices and the environment in the UK and India. These two studies had different foci but shared a concern to capture embedded and/or invisible practices from the participants’ viewpoint. They both recognised the value of multiple data sources and methods (interviews, maps, observations, field notes, photo-elicitation). Below, we set out how we adapted these two methods for the purposes of our study of young fostered children’s educational and social lives before discussing our findings.

Study outline and methods

The study piloted an ethnographic methodology with foster carers to understand their ‘everyday’ lives with foster children of pre-school age. More specific aims around education were to explore:

what foster carers believe is ‘good’ care and a good upbringing for children they look after;

what they can do to provide a stimulating environment for very young children and what gets in the way;

the benefit of educational provisions available to them, such as free nursery places.

The researchers worked with a fostering team in one London borough to facilitate the recruitment of the participants with whom prior contact had been established. During a regular foster carers’ network meeting where the research team delivered a presentation about the project, the head of fostering introduced carers looking after pre-school age children to the researchers. Ethical clearance was obtained from the UCL Institute of Education’s Ethics Committee. Conducting research with looked after children and gaining parental consent can be complex, depending on the status of the child. Of the six children in our sample, we required consent from two sets of birth parents as the local authority had shared parental responsibility for the child with them. This led to significant delays in beginning fieldwork with the foster carers and underlines the difficulties of researching this area.

While we drew on the Mosaic approach, we adapted it so that the main participant was the carer, in a similar way to Clark’s adaptation of the approach to engage with early childhood practitioners’ perspectives (Clark, 2011). Our initial intention was to address children’s views directly, especially those aged three to four years, but this proved not to be viable given that most of the children had developmental delays. We drew on Phoenix and colleagues’ (2017) work by similarly using multiple visits with participants, photos of ‘everyday life’ and photo elicitation discussions, alongside the construction of photomaps (further details below). The fieldwork design comprised three visits from the researcher and made use of the methods outlined in Table 1.

Table 1.

Summary of ethnographic methods.

	Method	Comments
Visit 1 (half-day)	Interviews	A semi-structured interview conducted in the home with the foster carer
Visit 1 (half-day)	Observation and shadowing; field notes	Qualitative observation accounts of child and foster carer at home and/or outside (e.g. park, playgroup). Foster carers requested to take photographs of everyday life over next two weeks
Visit 2 (one hour)	Photography	Upload foster carers’ photographs to secure digital platform, and selection for printing
Visit 2 (one hour)	Observation and shadowing; field notes	Qualitative observation accounts of child and foster carer at home and/or outside (e.g. park, playgroup)
Visit 3 (one to two hours)	Photomap making	2D representations of everyday life of foster carers with young children using photos and foster carers’ own written labels
Visit 3 (one to two hours)	Observation; field notes	Qualitative observation accounts of child and foster carer at home

Table 2.

Participants’ details.

	Details of foster children
Foster carer 1	13 months old, developmental delays (speech, physical)
Foster carer 2	Seven months old, born two months premature
Foster carer 3	Six months old, no known special developmental or physical health needs
Foster carer 4	Three years old, physical health problems, developmental delays (speech, physical)
Foster carer 5	Two-year-old twins, developmental delays (speech)

In total, five foster carers were recruited, all of them female. All were experienced in fostering, each having looked after children aged 0‒4 years for between seven and ten years. Indicative of the ethnic diversity in the borough in which the study was conducted, three of the carers were from African-Caribbean backgrounds, one was African and one was White British. (Details of the children they looked after are listed in Table 2.)

Alongside interviews, field notes and observation, map making and photo elicitation were used to capture the more taken for granted aspects of everyday life that might have been omitted from reporting in interviews. Foster carers were asked to take photos of everyday activities over a two-week period. Examples included feeding, climbing stairs and habitual practices related to these, such as encouraging independence through eating and play. While observation − as a means to explore how and what people say compared to what they do − was an essential element of the ethnographic approach (alongside the interviews and informal chats), the photos were a way of seeing everyday life through the eyes of the foster carer, by examining what pictures they chose to take and which they went on to select. By organising and labelling the photomaps, we aimed to provide carers with space to co-construct their stories of everyday life with their young foster children and capture the accompanying simultaneous verbal narrative. The photomap making was an attempt at creating the opportunity to construct a narrative together, for the participant to ‘think what they think’ about their ‘world right now’.

The methodological tools and frameworks for recording data were constructed with early childhood education in mind. The interview questions and fieldwork recording sheet were devised to cover specific features identified in Mathers and colleagues’ (2012; 2016) work on high quality childminding, which was selected as a similar domestic and work environment. Given that the tools to which they refer are specific to formal ECEC settings, not all are applicable to foster carers providing for children in their homes. However, some of the measures of good childminding were very much part of everyday life with foster carers, and as such, we drew on the following features of the scales:

space and furnishings (e.g. play and learning, child-related display, gross motor equipment);

personal care routines (e.g. meals/snacks, naps/rest);

language/reasoning (e.g. books and pictures, encouraging children to communicate, using language to develop reasoning skills, informal use of language);

activities (e.g. fine motor activities, art, music/movement, nature/science, numbers, use of TV, video and/or computers);

interaction (e.g. discipline, carer‒child interactions, interactions with other children) (cited in Mathers, Singler and Karemaker, 2012).

In addition, the head of fostering at the local authority was interviewed to gain his or her perspective on policy and practice, and a focus group with six foster carers who had not been involved in the ethnography was held for the purposes of further reflection on the initial findings. However, this article focuses on the data generated from the ethnographic methods with the five foster carers. We discuss three main areas of findings that reflect what we saw as the everyday educational and social lives of young children in foster care. These capture how the ‘stimulating environment’ was provided by carers and others involved in the children’s lives, but also the barriers and difficulties encountered in providing such an environment.

Findings

What foster carers do: ‘everyday’ lives and education

Providing basic ‘care’ needs of food, hygiene and affection was a strong if not the dominant feature of all foster carers’ narratives, which was encapsulated by the following carer’s response:

… you have to have a real, genuine love and a passion that you want to help these kids, and also provide a good home… home environment for them, that they can feel secure and feel warm and that they know this is a place that … there’s trust here. I can be myself here. I'm not going to get hurt … And also for them to feel you are there for them …You know, those kind of things … (Foster carer 5, interview)

When carers were asked what it means to provide good foster care, typical responses included: ‘looking after them like one of my own, love, patience, kindness, providing them with safety, making them feel wanted, and keeping them clean’. One photomap reflected these typical interview responses, depicting the home as functional, well equipped, safe and hygienic.

Some photomaps, like the one above (Photomap 1), reflected what are arguably the most predictable and anticipated aspects of everyday life of foster carers and their children, given that carers are expected to provide a home that is ‘warm, adequately furnished and decorated, is maintained to a good standard of cleanliness and hygiene and is in good order throughout’ (Department for Education, 2011: Standard 10.2). However, others captured the unexpected. For instance, many of Foster carer 2’s photos were of shopping, which spurred her to group these together and thematise the map as ‘Shopping stuff every day’ (Photomap 2).

Shopping was not a daily activity which the carer spoke about during interviews and informal chats, but through the maps it became clear how integral it was to her week, thus highlighting the relevance of the photo method in capturing ‘the everyday’. The articulation of such everyday activities opens up a further line of analysis in terms of contextualising the carers as socially and economically located individuals. In this case, the carer, a single mother, lived in a flat above shops with her two older children (both over 16 years of age) and did not own a car. It became evident how she spent much of her time travelling on foot and bus to shops to buy various items for her family. Her shopping journeys reflected her migrant background, going to specialist shops to buy specific food items to cater for family preferences, and also the dietary needs of the foster child by purchasing specialist baby milk. Other carers who were married or living with a partner spoke of the help they had with everyday tasks like shopping and, as such, appeared to have more time and support to take up a range of activities, such as accessing swimming pools and a variety of playgroups further from home. These findings suggest the need to consider and contextualise who foster carers are in terms of their backgrounds and home lives and to further understand what might facilitate or create barriers to a ‘stimulating environment’ for young children in foster care. Most importantly, they signal that everyday routines and environments in foster homes should be considered by the wider fostering team when planning for meeting the needs of the child, and how foster carers can be better supported to provide a ‘stimulating environment’ (Department for Education, 2011: Standard 7.1).

Other routine everyday activities that we found to be present in foster carers’ homes and conducive to the ‘stimulating environment’ included feeding, interaction such as singing, talking and physical affection and domestic family life consisting of contact with the extended family, friends and special events. Being present in foster carers’ homes, the researcher observed daily practices including feeding, changing, playing, singing and talking to the child. Feeding during mealtimes also represented moments in which affection was commonly conveyed. Cuddling, joking and open questions were observable among all carers, and affectionate behaviour during mealtimes was common, particularly with the very young children (Foster carers 1, 2 and 3).

Displays of warmth when feeding young children consisted of jokes and talking to the child in a soft and playful tone (Foster carer 1). Given that the 13-month old had physical developmental delays and could not hold a spoon (a movement that would usually be seen as typical for a child of this age), the carer’s patient approach was crucial. Her commitment to ensuring that the child had been fed was carried out using physical affection and verbal encouragement. The researcher observed that when the child stopped eating, she picked her up and put her on her lap, and while being cradled, the child continued to eat:

Being on her foster carer’s lap appeared to make baby happier – she was smiling, making lots of eye contact with her carer and vice versa, and baby also was turning to me and looking. She appeared to really enjoy being physically close to the foster carer, and being talked to and joked with while being fed. She was touching the carer’s leg while being fed on her lap … They appeared to have a good bond, and being physically close to the foster carer had a noticeable effect on the level of return interaction from baby. (Foster carer 1, field notes, visit 1)

Similarly, feeding time with Foster carer 2 was characterised by praise and encouragement (e.g. ‘bravo’, ‘excellent’, ‘good boy’). The display of affection also appeared to be important in motivating the child to eat. She provided cuddles, ‘kissing noises’ and talked directly to him. Singing was also a means to engage with the child while feeding. Her persistence through affection appeared to be important to counter his resistance to eating (Foster carer 2, field notes, visits 1 and 2). Such moments provide a window onto the important role that foster carers play in responding to specific feeding needs for children who may experience such mundane activities as difficult. The carers’ displays of affection and the warm emotional climate contributed to the ‘stimulating environment’ that supports the development of the children’s skills, particularly the emotional, social, and physical (Department for Education, 2011: Standard 7.1).

A further feature of all the carers’ everyday lives was providing a stimulating environment through interaction with other children in the extended foster family. Some carers looked after their nieces, grandchildren and their birth children who were of a similar age, which provided valuable stimulation and interaction (Foster carers 1, 3, and 4). Such interactions were particularly important for children who struggled in formal ECEC settings due to developmental delay (discussed further below ‘Foster carers as “everyday experts” in meeting complex needs’):

Foster carer’s niece being on the mat also made a difference to the baby – niece interacted with baby by passing her toys, and baby reached out and was touching these a lot more with her than with us adults. Her presence seems like an important addition to the household! She was stimulating her – baby wanted to touch the same toys as niece and was definitely more responsive to the child. (Foster carer 1, field notes, visit 1)

Similarly, Foster carer 4 spoke about the importance of including the child as part of the family, by bringing him to special events such as her daughter’s graduation and other wider family gatherings. By taking him to a university and seeing his foster sister graduate, she commented on the potential significance of such memories for his own educational aspirations. Being part of the fabric of everyday family life appeared to provide the children with stimulation through interactive social skills and intellectual development, as well as emotional bonding through encouraging a sense of belonging and inclusion.

Foster carers’ meanings and perspectives on early education

During interviews, carers talked about education as something delivered by other professionals. For instance, all five carers talked extensively about taking their foster child to formal educational pre-school settings, such as playgroups, toddlers groups, nurseries and sing-along sessions at local libraries. These activities formed an integral part of their week and were recognised by the carers as important − arguably an expected finding given the now normative discourses about the value of early years education (Department for Education, 2017b). Taking the child to the park and walking around the local area were also regular activities. Education in everyday life appeared as: (1) structured/formal education sessions outside the home (e.g. playgroup, park, libraries); (2) educational equipment in the home (e.g. books and toys ‒ usually plastic and boldly coloured, digital technologies to play educational games such as learning the alphabet); and (3) play-based learning (e.g. bubbles and messy play).

Many photomaps reflected the place of formal educational settings and outside play spaces, but they also captured what foster carers view to be educational in the home. The maps and spending time in foster carers’ homes showed equipment and where it was located (e.g. play mat in the lounge, books in the bedroom, types of toys and suitability for the child’s developmental age).

Strikingly, Foster carer 4 presents a snapshot of the home for the child. Her selection of photos of books in the child’s bedroom, toys that he enjoys playing with, and his ‘bright and colourful’ room all emphasise educational stimulation and activities for his development (Photomap 3).

Foster carers were aware of the discourse of play-based learning through their contact with nursery and playgroup settings. When asked how young children learn best, one carer explained:

I think a lot of it comes through play. And other children as well … from each other, learning together. Put them in a group. (Foster carer 4, interview)

However, observations of what the carers did at home suggested little presence of play-based learning, with the exception of Foster carer 5 who was a trained nursery worker and intentionally used sand, home-made play dough and everyday objects to support children’s learning. Play-based learning is widely regarded as beneficial for younger children and is commonly seen to constitute an integral part of early education (MacIntyre, 2001; Pramling Samuelsson and Fleer, 2009). But for some children, such as those with developmental delays, there may be barriers to engaging in play-based learning like playing with sand and other natural textures. For example, Foster carer 1 expressed her concern that playing with sand would pose a risk to the child who, because of her clenched fists, would get sand in her eyes. We also found that in addition to the perceived risks associated with play-based learning, perceptions of messy play sat in contrast to foster carers’ narratives about the importance of hygiene, conflicting with presentations of their homes as organised, hygienic and tidy spaces to adhere to the official guidance. Our data suggest that a more nuanced understanding is required of how play-based learning that is messy may not be afforded high priority in the ‘hygienic’ spaces of foster homes, and where ‘risks’ of accidents must be effectively managed and minimised (Department for Education, 2011: Standard 4).

Foster carers as ‘everyday experts’ in meeting complex needs: navigating professional relations and early education

Carrying out a caring role for very young children requires attending to basic needs, being attentive and responsive through providing care such as physical affection, feeding, nappy changing and bedtime routines, all embedded in an ‘ethics of care’ (Tronto, 1993). Beyond such ‘typical’ parenting activities and tasks, we found that the carers in our study were looking after very young children who often had complex, multiple physical health and developmental needs. They were also at the core of what were sometimes complicated legal situations and processes between the birth family and adoption, as well as being tasked with the integration of the foster child into foster family life.

Carers talked in interviews and informal chats about how complex and busy everyday life is for them and the children they look after. Common activities included taking children to visit a number of professionals and specialists for health or development issues. Accompanying children to contact with their birth parents anywhere between one and five times a week made heavy demands on their time. These activities ran alongside going to playgroup, libraries, parks and their other family responsibilities, such as cooking, cleaning, shopping and looking after their own and other children like grandchildren, nieces and nephews. Through the following diagram we map what caring for very young fostered children typically involved (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Foster carers and their young foster children: a web of relations.

Photomap 1.

‘Inside my carer’s home’ (Foster carer 1).

Photomap 2.

‘Shopping stuff every day’ (Foster carer 2).

Photomap 3.

‘My world right now’ (Foster carer 4).

Navigating the web of relations, activities and needs was a common feature of discussion among all the carers in the study. The number of professionals involved in the young children’s care went well beyond the local authority team. Physiotherapists, speech and language therapists, dieticians, health visitors and opthalmologists were among the professionals cited by carers with whom they engaged on behalf of their child. This led some to feel as though they were doing more than should be expected of foster carers. As Foster carer 4 explained during an informal conversation, there is ‘so much involved in looking after a child with complex needs’.

One obstacle to foster carers accessing ECEC for the young children they look after is the time involved in taking the children to see these various professionals, to contact centres to meet with birth parents, alongside home visits from social workers. This sometimes meant that attending educational settings was difficult. As one foster carer explained, at the beginning, contact can be several times a week:

When they first have contact it can be five to seven days a week. Then it gradually gets a bit lesser and lesser and lesser as you go on. But obviously with the parents not turning up half the time, it quickly went from five days to like three days or two days and then one day and then none … It’s full on. (Foster carer 3, interview)

Schofield and Simmonds (2011) explore the debates and practice contexts of contact for infants subject to care proceedings. The authors note (p. 74) that:

… [while] the goal is to achieve good quality contact that enables the infant to experience their parent as a familiar figure … this frequency should be at a level that does not interfere with the infant’s need for consistent physical and emotional care in the foster home and to form a positive relationship with the foster carer.

Our findings similarly demonstrate the adverse impact that high levels of contact can have on young foster children’s access to ECEC.

Being the constant adult involved in the children’s lives often meant that the carers were the ones who knew the child best and were at the forefront of identifying barriers to ECEC. Study observations revealed how the carers were not only attending to children’s basic needs, but also observing and assessing further needs and adapting their caring practices to suit each child. Since they often received the children as young babies and toddlers, the carers were also at the forefront of observing development issues and were sometimes the first to identify physical and speech delay. Four of the six children had some such delay, which carers sometimes recognised to be a barrier to taking up ECEC. During the walk to playgroup, Foster carer 1 spoke of the pressure from the child’s social worker to provide certain types of educational stimulation, which was highly encouraged to strengthen interaction with other children. However, the carer felt that this was inappropriate for that particular child’s developmental stage:

… Foster carer said that she happily takes her [to playgroup] twice a week, but has understood that because of slow development, she does not use the playgroup in the same way as other children. She cannot do messy play, or go in the sand pit as she rubs her eyes with clenched fists a lot. She also does not stay for snack time because she cannot eat as the others do [e.g. would choke on bananas]. FC comments it will be on ‘her neck’ if she chokes. Her responsibility to make sure she is safe. (Foster carer 1, field notes, visit 2)

Similarly, Foster carer 4 explained how ECEC settings could sometimes be challenging for the child she was looking after. He had poor leg development stemming from having contracted rickets due to malnourishment as a baby:

… he cannot keep up with other kids, running, communication. I’ve seen that where he's just sort of sat down and just played by himself because he can't keep up with the other children…So things like that slow him down, you know. (Foster carer 4, interview)

In addition to the child’s physical delay, Foster carer 4 also identified that his speech was delayed, which required her to take special care when choosing educational toys for use in the home. While constructing the photomap ‘My world right now’, she explained:

… the items are important for him because they show what developmental stage he is at – he is definitely below three years – so the shapes and colours help him … I picked these toys because looking at him, not even as a three-year-old, but someone who is younger, I am trying to build him and develop him from coming back and forward again … like an 18-month-old … (Foster carer 4, field notes, photomap making)

Burger (2015: 756) cautions that ‘adults must not over-stimulate children’s development but provide care and education responsively to children’s needs and abilities’. Our data highlight how foster carers are well placed to understand the learning capacities of their particular child, but also indicate a need for them to have basic knowledge of child development and young children’s learning. At the time of data collection, specific sessions on this area were not a core part of the borough’s training package for foster carers.

Foster carers have reported feeling undervalued and dismissed by social workers, managers and teachers, reflecting a failure to treat carers professionally, despite the fact that they are the people who know the child best (Narey and Owers, 2018). The examples from our research demonstrate how foster carers should be seen as everyday experts in the needs of the child in the following ways:

The carer was a key figure in identifying the child’s needs.

Providing a ‘stimulating environment’ for young children with developmental delays needs to be integral to the care plan for fostered children (i.e. that a one-size fits all approach is not appropriate); foster carers should be part of the team to input into the plan (Narey and Owers, 2018).

Foster carers looking after children with complex needs are at the forefront of managing the risks involved in taking such children to ECEC settings that may pose hazards. In addition to ‘choking’ because of the child not having developed swallowing skills (Foster carer 1), another was concerned about taking her foster child swimming because of his heart condition and having to ask health professionals what can and cannot be done (Foster carer 2). Foster carer 4 explained that, from her perspective, the hygiene levels in playgroups had gone down which she attributed to funding cuts and a downturn in quality. This made her apprehensive about taking her foster child to playgroups because he had weakened immunity.

A further barrier to taking up ECEC arose from different understandings of attachment theory. The temporality of foster children’s stay was seen by some carers to be in conflict with the process of settling them into nursery, which could also conflict with the attachment they as carers were forming with the child. One carer explained how her social worker had advised against attending nursery due to uncertainty surrounding the length of the placement and the child being adopted in the near future. Forming attachments to key workers in nursery for a short period of time was seen as potentially detrimental, and developing an attachment to the foster carer was prioritised. As the foster carer explained:

… forming multiple attachments [is] not good when you are trying to form your own … contact also takes time – and it is more important for them to see parents rather than taking them to educational setting. (Foster carer 4, notes from informal conversation)

Limitations and challenges of the project

We identify a number of limitations and challenges. Firstly, the research was conducted for a small pilot project. Funding was limited and the sample size of five carers reflects this restriction. However, due to the depth of the data collection, it has been possible to generate a comprehensive picture of the social and educational lives of young children in foster care which, to our knowledge, has not been done before. Secondly, and typical of working with foster carers more generally, participants had busy schedules which meant that arranging and carrying out multiple fieldwork visits were challenging. From start to finish, fieldwork with the five carers was completed over a six-month period, but the duration of the project was much longer − it was first discussed with the local authority in November 2016 and funded in February 2017. Negotiations to set up fieldwork, including the complex consent process to enable the children to take part, took three months. From the point of funding to the end of data collection, the project duration was nine months. Thirdly, given that the local authority was instrumental in selecting the participants, it is possible that the carers were ‘hand picked’ to reflect the borough’s ‘best’ carers.

Conclusions and reflections

The demands on the everyday lives of young children in foster care are complex and multiple, from domestic routines, to contact with health and developmental professionals, to the requirements of the foster care system. This can make meeting their educational needs a challenge, with notable barriers in accessing and ‘using’ formal education settings. Hectic schedules punctuated by contact with birth parents and meetings with professionals often acted as obstacles to the take-up of ECEC. Given the importance of high quality early education for outcomes in later life (Mathers, et al., 2016), for socially and educationally disadvantaged children like those in foster care, the need for a sound educational beginning is paramount. Urgent attention needs to be paid to these barriers so that young children in foster care are able to access the best possible educational start in life. Our exploration of the ‘everyday’ through ethnography allows us to visualise care and education beyond formalised settings such as playgroups and nurseries. We highlight the important role that foster carers play in young foster children’s education, a group who require greater levels of support and attention than children who are not in care (Mathers, et al., 2016; Cameron, Connelly and Jackson, 2015).

Reflecting on our adaptation of Mathers’s features of a ‘stimulating environment’, we found that carers were heavily invested in providing furnishings and equipment such as toys, and that they provided positive interactions with themselves and other children. They also made significant contributions to the child, through personal care routines and interactions, stimulating their emotional, intellectual, social and physical skills. However, there was less engagement with some activities such as play-based learning in the home. We also found that not all carers adopted educative practices such as reading to babies and very young children. Such findings highlight the complexities of positioning foster carers as educators and defining expectations of them in relation to the ‘stimulating environment’ fostering services are expected to provide.

Further, the relationship of foster carers to regulation and standards shapes their daily practice. They are socially, culturally and economically located, and their understandings of education and care derive from this positioning. Carers’ meanings and experiences of education, and associated social, cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu and Passerson, 1990; Lareau, 2011), arguably shape the care and education of young children in foster care but, to our knowledge, this is yet to be researched. Time spent by foster carers on caring responsibilities for the wider family and the support they receive from other family members in providing care and education for foster children discussed in this article are also understudied. In addition, the positioning of foster carers as a predominantly female, non-professionalised group of carers with an accompanying lack of benefits, such as pensions, sick pay and annual leave (Narey and Owens, 2018), has not, to our knowledge, been explored in light of the implications for the education of foster children.

Overall, our study demonstrates how foster carers are experts in the children’s everyday lives in managing the routine and mundane as well as navigating the professional web of relations involved in meeting the often highly complex needs of the young children they look after. We hope that insights generated from our research will encourage fostering teams to support carers to develop ways to harness educational opportunities in their everyday environments.¹

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors would like to thank UCL Institute of Education Seed Fund, which provided the funding for this pilot project, and the participants and borough staff who supported the study.

Note

Veena Meetoo is a research officer at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education.

Claire Cameron is professor of social pedagogy, UCL Institute of Education.

Alison Clark is honorary senior research fellow, Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education.

Sonia Jackson is professor emerita, UCL Institute of Education.

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