Milton Keynes City Council: Fostering service apologises to carers

Sharon Godfrey has apologised to foster carers

A fostering service has apologised and admitted to foster carers "we have done wrong" after failures in management and a lack of support were found.

Former Milton Keynes City Council foster carers have previously told the BBC they felt "emotionally bullied" and "mistreated" by the service.

Head of corporate parenting Sharon Godfrey said carers had not received the service "we would have wished".

She said it had made management changes and had an improvement plan.

Last year, an inspection of the authority's children's services by Ofsted found "shortfalls" in the fostering service had "existed for too long without effective action being taken".

Internal reviews by the council later found that support for foster carers through supervision was "inadequate", and there was "a failing in management oversight which led to a lack of challenge around the service being provided to foster carers".

Carers have also told the BBC about being inappropriately referred to safeguarding and feeling "intimidated" in meetings, and having felt like having no choice but to leave the service.

Claire O'Sullivan fostered with Milton Keynes City Council on and off since 2002 but felt she had to leave

Ms Godfrey said: "We're apologising because we recognise that we haven't given the service to our carers that we would have wished.

"We are apologising to all of our foster carers out there and specifically the carers that have contacted [the BBC], because obviously we have said sorry to them and we acknowledged that we have done wrong... and we want to get this right.

"So it's really important that we now we move forward and have a better offer to all our carers."

Ms Godfrey acknowledged the council "perhaps took our eye off the ball and we weren't thinking about what was the impact here, but also I think our lines of communication were failing and we weren't getting the right feedback. So we've put that right.

"I've offered to meet my foster carers on a weekly basis so people can come and talk to us, if they want to give me a call once a week or whatever, or I could go to the support group that we offer."

She said when Ofsted inspected the council, it was "in the infancy of our improvement plan".

"We have continued with that improvement plan and we have made a number of changes to the leadership and management, to the staffing structure," she said.

"That includes the level of supervision that we're offering. We have revised our training, as well as offering clinical supervision to our carers and getting better communication between them and us has been really important."

Milton Keynes Council said it was "sorry that we didn't always get it right for our dedicated foster carers"

Asked whether she accepted the claims of intimidation and bullying, Ms Godfrey said: "If people feel like that we have to acknowledge that that was a shortfall from whatever staff were dealing with that and I'm confident that we have addressed that now.

"We've put in a policy if anyone has any of those kind of concerns they can come to us we can sort it out we can talk about it.

"But that is absolutely not the culture that we're trying to create here at Milton Keynes City Council and I feel confident that we have moved forward on that."