A caring approach to foster care in Wales

We Care

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

Leading experts in foster care with real life experience

We Understand

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

Working alongside YOU for CHANGE

At Safer Fostering, we are committed to delivering a truly therapeutic fostering service rooted in innovative, forward-thinking practice. Our work centres on nurturing Secure Attachments through Empathic Reparenting, ensuring that every child has the opportunity to thrive in a stable, supportive family environment.

Our foster parents are esteemed co-professionals and the agency is proud to provide unparalleled high-quality, intensive support to help them meet the complex needs of the children in their care. Everything we do is guided by one clear principle: children’s needs come before profit.

Our vision is bold. We place family stability and exceptional outcomes for children at the heart of our mission. And we’re not afraid to lead change — embracing new ways of thinking and developing tools and procedures where the fostering sector has long needed reform.

The Safer Fostering Difference

At Safer Fostering, we are proud to be led by individuals with lived experience of parenting children who have been through trauma. This unique foundation shapes our deep understanding of the challenges fostering families face and drives our commitment to create strong, relationships and lasting stability.

The agency is led some of the UK’s most forward-thinking and dynamic experts in therapeutic parenting who have also led OFSTED ‘Outstanding’ fostering agencies. Their insight and leadership ensure that our approach is both compassionate and evidence-based.

Our team are specialists in:

  • Compassion fatigue in foster parents
  • Developmental trauma in children

We work proactively to reduce the impact of these challenges on fostering families. Through close collaboration with professionals, we help interrupt unhelpful and entrenched behaviour patterns that could otherwise lead to family breakdown or children needing to move unexpectedly.

Helping you connect with your foster child by providing foster care in Wales

Our Approach to Foster Care

We have replaced outdated methods of working, and instead introduced joined up, seamless processes. This innovative practice starts with the new Therapeutic Fostering Assessment for applicants which incorporates all training, Continuing Professional Development and qualifications, as well as providing an easily accessible, straightforward assessment which truly reflects the fostering family’s expectations, motivation and training needs.

Our practice is further enhanced by the use of our Trauma Tracker© which identifies potential problems which may arise so that strategies can be put in place.

The Trauma Tracker© is a powerful tool that helps us map a child’s life journey — including any changes in caregivers, significant events, and experiences of trauma. By piecing together this personal chronology, we gain deeper insight into how the child might express their emotions.

It also helps to identify developmental stages that may have been missed or only partially completed. With specialist training and ongoing guidance, our foster parents are able to shape their parenting approach to meet each child’s emotional and developmental needs with empathy and understanding.

Meaningful Support

The Founders of Safer Fostering instigated and commissioned the first ever world- wide research into compassion fatigue in Foster Care in 2016 with Bristol University. This research has impacted significantly on the way Foster Parents are supported. Compassion fatigue (sometimes referred to as ‘blocked care’), is a real and debilitating physiological condition which can be experienced by therapeutic parents who are re-parenting children from trauma. At SAfER Fostering we understand this condition and we are able to put in place robust, supportive scaffolding which keeps our Therapeutic Foster Parents out of compassion fatigue, and therefore keeps families together,

Our Founders and Directors

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.

  • International best- selling author and key-note speaker in therapeutic parenting
  • Adopter of 5 children
  • Expert/ consultant to Independent Fostering agencies, adoption agencies and Local Authorities
  • Former foster parent
  • Former owner of Ofsted ‘Outstanding’ therapeutic fostering agency
  • Director of Ofsted ‘Outstanding’ therapeutic fostering agency
  • Former Social Worker
  • Founder of The National Association of Therapeutic Parents
  • Founder of the Centre of Excellence in Child Trauma
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.

  • Attachment therapist achieving ground-breaking outcomes
  • Best selling author in child trauma and therapeutic parenting
  • Key-note speaker
  • Expert/ consultant to Independent Fostering agencies, adoption agencies and Local Authorities
  • Former fostered child
  • Therapeutic Lead for the Centre of Excellence in Child Trauma
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.

  • Qualified Social Worker
  • Adopter of two sons
  • Former Regional Director for the largest fostering agency in the UK
  • Led fostering agencies to OFSTED ‘Outstanding’
  • Has worked alongside foster parents since 2005
  • Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy and Counselling trained
  • Created and delivered Therapeutic Parenting training to Foster Parents.