Providing safer fostering care for parents and childrenSafer Fostering are expert foster care providers in Wales
Safer Fostering are expert foster care providers in Wales

Therapeutic Fostering

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A caring approach to foster care in Wales

Therapeutic Foster Support

Holding your hand so you can keep holding your child’s

Leading experts in foster care with real life experience

Trauma Informed Training

Our UK leading expert team have ‘real life’ experience

We're a children first foster support company and are not for profit

We Believe

In Children not Profit- We are a not-for-profit company

SAfER Fostering CIC

– A Real Therapeutic Team

SAfER Fostering is an independent Community Interest Company founded and run by Sarah Naish, Sarah Dillon and Alison Douglas. Their leadership is hands-on and trauma informed – rooted in lived experience, strengthened by professional expertise and focused on improving outcomes for children and the families who care for them.  Between them, our founders bring over 90 years of combined experience working alongside foster parents, as well as personal experience of living with and therapeutically parenting children who have experienced significant trauma.

At SAfER Fostering, children and Therapeutic Foster Parents are at the heart of everything we do. Our relationship-based, trauma-informed approach helps children feel safe, understood and supported to heal, while ensuring foster parents are never left to manage complexity alone.  Crucially, our founders work day-to-day within the agency, shaping practice, guiding teams and supporting families. SAfER Fostering is not led from a distance — it is run by people who are actively involved and widely recognised as UK leaders in child trauma and therapeutic parenting.

Sarah Naish founder of Safer Fostering Wales

Sarah Naish

Sarah Naish’s work is grounded in deep lived experience. She draws on her background as a former social worker, foster parent, and adoptive mother to a family of five profoundly traumatised siblings—bringing rare authenticity and credibility to everything she teaches and leads.  Sarah is widely recognised as a trailblazer in child trauma and therapeutic parenting. She has developed specialist parenting models that have had national impact, significantly increasing recognition of the complex needs of traumatised children.

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Sarah Dillon

Sarah Dillon brings together powerful lived experience and extensive clinical expertise to shape trauma-informed practice across fostering, adoption and kinship care.  At the heart of Sarah’s work is her own lived experience. She spent much of her childhood as a looked-after child within the care system. This perspective deeply informs her practice—bringing compassion, realism and credibility to everything she does.

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Alison Douglas

Alison Douglas

Alison Douglas has decades of social work experience, her vocation initially inspired the adoption of her sons.  An interest in neuroscience research, linking childhood neglect to impaired brain development, led to a meeting with Sarah Naish. Alison was a Regional Director for the UK’s largest IFA before founding SAfER Fostering, and she has led fostering agencies to OFSTED Outstanding. Her passion for this work is driven by the insights and resilience gained through her own life journey.

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Therapeutic Fostering or Standard Fostering – is there really a difference?

When I began fostering nearly forty years ago, it quickly became clear that traditional parenting approaches did not work for traumatised children. Reward charts, time out and behaviourist strategies failed to address behaviours rooted in fear, loss and disrupted attachment.

I later qualified as a Social Worker and went on to adopt five children. Through both personal and professional experience, I came to understand the deep gap between what parents of traumatised children need and what the system often provides. My children taught me that trauma changes everything.

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Foster Care in Cardiff provided by Safer Fostering

Standard or Therapeutic Fostering?

Every child in care has experienced trauma, yet the sector still talks about “standard” versus “therapeutic” fostering, as though some children are unaffected. This distinction is unhelpful. Trauma impacts behaviour, relationships and brain development, and many foster parents are unprepared for the reality of what they will face. Too often, professionals are equally ill-equipped to support them.

The result has been widespread burnout. In 2016, research carried out with Bristol University* found that almost 50% of foster carers had experienced compassion fatigue, leading to emotional exhaustion, reduced empathy and disconnection. This is not a failure of foster parents; it is a systemic failure. We have taken everything we know as foster parents and adopters and put this into practice within True Fostering/Safer Fostering.

Therapeutic Fostering Assesments

Therapeutic parenting is not a technique or program. It is a way of life – structured, consistent and rooted in empathy. It helps children move from “I am bad” to “bad things happened to me”. Crucially, foster parents can only parent therapeutically if they are supported therapeutically themselves.

Within Safer Fostering, we developed the Therapeutic Fostering Assessment, moving away from risk-averse, tick-box processes towards preparation, reflection and meaningful ongoing support. We also introduced Empathic Listeners, whose role is to listen without judgement and help families maintain empathy through challenge.

Trauma-Informed Training

This is not complex or costly. It requires a mindset shift: from fixing to listening, from blame to understanding, from “standard” to trauma-informed.

Through the Centre of Excellence in Child Trauma (COECT), we now provide free trauma-informed training for local authorities and charities, alongside accredited qualifications including a Level 4 in trauma-informed practice. Every social worker, and every fostering service, should be trauma-informed as standard.

When foster parents are supported, children thrive.

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