• Home
• Fostering young refugees

Fostering young refugees

About fostering young refugees

Fostering a young refugee means you’ll be providing safety and security to a vulnerable child or young person. You’ll offer them support, care and guidance as well as a place to call home, which makes being a foster carer an incredibly rewarding role.

Although many aspects of fostering a young refugee will be the same as with any young person, there will be some areas where you will require extra support. 

For example: 

• The young person may speak little or no English. You’ll be supported with translation and any language barriers,
• The process of seeking asylum will be unfamiliar to most of our foster carers and supported lodgings providers. This will be covered in training.

• It’s likely that many young people seeking asylum in this country will have been through traumatic experiences, such as seeing war first hand. You’ll be trained specifically on what to expect and how to deal with trauma.  
• Many young refugees arrive without family or a trusted adult. In many cases, they do not know where their family are, or even if they are still alive. Because of this it’s very unlikely that you will have any contact with their birth family.  

Full training addressing these issues will be provided for foster carers looking after young refugees, as well as support from your Local Authority to help you make a life changing difference to a young person who needs you. 

Meet our young refugees to find out more about the experiences of young people arriving in the UK or read more about the Training and Support available.