Fostering One Minute Guides

Email Communication between Foster Carers and Social Workers

Effective communication between foster carers and children’s social workers is essential to enabling high quality care for fostered children and for those children achieving their best possible outcomes in stable homes.

This guide is provided to support this effective communication.

Foster Carers

• In writing an email it is helpful to copy in both the child’s sw and your supervising social worker
• Names of children should be anonymised
• At the beginning give a one sentence summary of what your email is about
• Then add one sentence about what you want by way of response and how quickly
• If you do not need a response but want to provide information please say that
• Emails should be brief –  writing a number of paragraphs delays response as it adds to reading time (if you need to pass on a large volume of information this should be in conversation following an email or in a separate document)
• If you do not receive a timely response to your email you should use the escalation policy (add reference)
• Do not include personal data in the subject heading
• If replying or forwarding an email, always check the email trail to ensure that you are not sharing personal data unlawfully, which would result in you committing a data breach

Social Workers

• It is an expectation of Coventry’s Foster Carer and Support Strategy that social workers communicate with foster carers in a relational and timely way
• Children’s services recognise that there are times when competing demands may result in emails not being read and responded to immediately
• However, it is important to children that emails from foster carers receive a response
• It is an expectation that the out of office function is used for periods of absence or when leaving role with a clear indicator of who to email in the absence of the work
• Think carefully about who needs to receive the email and make sure the recipients email address is entered accurately and double check the details again before you press ‘send’