Family out walking with children.

Start your fostering journey

We have three simple steps to start your journey, to make sure that foster care is the right choice for you.

Initial enquiry

Fill in the enquiry form on this website, and we will then send an Information Pack out to you immediately.

In a few days, when you’ve had a chance to read the pack, we’ll give you a ring and have a chat. You may have some questions for us, and we can get to know a bit more about you.

If we are all happy to go ahead, we can arrange a visit to your home to talk things through in more detail.

You may think that you’d like to chat to someone who is a foster carer already to find out what it’s like for them, if that would be useful then we can arrange that for you.

Application form

After we've had a chat and we're all in agreement we'll send you  an application form for you to fill in. When we've received your completed application form we'll assign you a Supervising Social Worker to start your Fostering Assessment.

Assessment

The full fostering assessment takes about 16 weeks to complete. It's then considered by our Fostering Panel, and you will be invited to panel to contribute to the discussion.

The Fostering Panel will make a recommendation about you being approved as a foster carer, and then the final decision about this is made by the Agency Decision Maker who is the Head of Service for Fostering in Cheshire East, and you are told about the outcome of this decision.

Then, you’re ready to go..!

Page last reviewed: 01 November 2023