Exploring the Anti-professional Turn in English Foster Care: Implications for Policy, Practice and Research

Following decades in which professionalisation was widely assumed to be a permanent (and growing) feature of foster care in England, the government signalled a clear anti-professional turn in its 2018 publication Fostering Better Outcomes (FBOs). This rejected the notion that foster carers should be regarded as professionals and indicated that there should be a return to the term foster parent. This article analyses FBO, its feeder reports and evidence submitted by stakeholders to map the shifting debate surrounding professionalisation. This includes both direct commentary on its (de)merits, but also discussion of components such as pay, conditions, motivation, training, expertise, a national college or register and related questions of supporting and valuing foster carers. A number of important flaws are identified within the review process. These include an ahistorical and insular treatment of professionalisation, its conflation with employment, a homogenisation of foster care and deployment of a familial discourse that fails to engage with its complexities and ‘hybrid’ nature between work and family. The consequence is a confused policy stance where professionalisation is rhetorically rejected while many of its core elements are endorsed. Implications of the anti-professional turn for policy, practice and research in England but also internationally, are discussed. This article analyses the treatment of ‘professionalisation’ of foster care in a recent government review of fostering in England. Over the years, foster care has moved from being seen as an extension of ‘ordinary family life’ towards a skilled ‘job’, with many foster carers being paid for their work and almost all required to undertake training. Although this move has always had critics, it was generally welcomed or accepted by governments on the grounds of recruitment and retention of carers and improving care for children. However, in 2018, following two separate reports, the Conservative government came out clearly against the idea that foster carers were professionals and stated that they should return to the earlier name of foster parents. The article explores this review process and argues that it was significantly flawed and contradictory. In particular, while rejecting the idea of professionalisation, it appeared to endorse its key principles, especially those relating to pay, training and support. In doing so, the review confused professionalisation with employment status and ignore