Fosterman’s Fostering Blog
It was all back to normal this week. It was a strange Easter break with James (name changed) being away for a good part of it and all the issues with his Mum. James enjoyed his time away but wasn’t letting on about how he felt about his Mum and all the palaver around her calls. I had handed the whole issue over to Social Services to deal with and had updated my Link-worker about the whole situation. James hadn’t mentioned it since he was back and I didn’t want to push him on it.
Paige’s mum had called me to see how he was, as she was concerned about the whole situation. I tried to explain, without giving too much detail, and she was upset that James had to go through all of this drama.
James had gone off in his normal jovial way and seemed happy to be seeing his mates again. He understood the importance of his school work and that had been reinforced by the talk he had received at his new football club. However James had always been aware of his education and how important it was for him to get as much out of school as he can do. I have a process with new placements of finding out their views on education as soon as possible in order to ascertain what they have been told by birth family or, in some cases, previous carers. To give his Mum some credit she had tried to fill James with the importance of education and his attitude towards it was a lot better than some previous placements.
I had a call from his Social Worker who had spoken to Mum. Apparently she had spoken to Mum to remind her about previous warnings regarding abusive phone calls and Mum had ‘kicked off’ and was very abusive towards the Social Worker. She had also made threats to the Social Worker and, indirectly, to me. I said to the Social Worker that this wasn’t the first time that this had happened and I wanted something done about it. She said she would discuss the matter with her Manager and get back to me.
Foster Care Blog
I then called my Link-worker and updated her and she said that she would also talk to the Local Authority about what was happened as it was unacceptable that Mum could get away with making threats like this. James got home from school and said that his mobile was full of missed calls, again, from a withheld number. So I sat him down and explained what had happened and what Mum had said. He pretty much rolled his eyes and said ‘no again’. So we ensured that his phone and my phone were set up so she couldn’t contact us and I made sure the landline was set up the same.
It was pretty much batten down the hatches. I couldn’t see what else we could do. We had attempted to retain good communications with Mum and to ensure that she was kept in the picture regarding James but her behaviour made this very difficult.
